July, 2008

VMWare’s ESXi vs Hyper-V, the details on what free really means

I was speaking to a co-worker today and he pointed me towards Mike’s blog at http://mikedatl.typepad.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/07/esx-35i-for-fre.html. After reading through it, it was obvious he had made some really great points.

 Microsoft has offered Hyper-V for free essentially with Windows 2008 but it doesn’t include the cost of Windows 2008 itself. ESXi on the other hand is a bare metal Hyper-visor which requires no OS for it’s installation and requires no purchase of Hyper-V.

 Also, in my humble opinion, once you grow out of the SMB market and start moving up, the features of VMWare trounce what Microsoft has to offer with Hyper-V. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Microsoft will continue to develop their offering and play catch up, but VMWare is there right now at what I find a very reasonable price.

 -RP

VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure Client in a 64 bit OS

For those of you getting into VMWare, you might try and install the VI client on your machine. If you have a 64 bit OS such as XP or Vista 64, you will get an error message saying you can’t install it because it’s only supported in a 32 bit environment.

The long and the short of it is that VMWare has made some changes to the client that might cause issues in 64 bit so the developers blocked 64 bit installations intentionally. You can still get around this however.

My personal favourite way is to just install a VM on your computer with a 32 bit OS and then run the client out of there. There are other things you can do is well and I suggest you read this link found here about the situation.

-RP

Monitoring in the Managed Services Industry

One of the key parts of any Managed Services offering is the ability to provide adequate monitoring to your clients. There are many pieces of software out there that claim they can do othe job of providing full monitoring for a Managed Services environment. These products are typically called Managed Services Platforms (MSPs).

 I’ve had the good fortune to use and try many MSPs and the one thing I have learned is that they all have their advantages. There really is no one good platform, it’s more about which platform makes the most sense for your Managed Services Business as they all have their own strengths, weaknesses, and focus.

 The key is to find a MSP that matches your offerings to your clients. The only way to do this is with a fully functional trial. When trying out software like this, your best bet is to install it in a test pilot scenario and use it as if you were supporting a real client. Give it all the same administrative attention you would give a product that you already own and are using. This way you can see how it works for you in your day to day consulting.

 Some of the more popular MSP companies out there are Kaseya, Level Platforms and N-Able.

 -RP

VMWare to offer ESXi for Free

Hi folks, if you haven’t already heard the exciting news, VMWare is going to be offering their ESXi product for free starting July 28th! This is obviously being done to compete with Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This is great news in my opinion as it will really foster great competition between the two products and can only result in both companies putting out better products for the consumer in the long run. You can read more about it here in eWeek’s article.

 One of the questions I’ve received is what is ESXi 3.5 and how does it differ from VMWare’s other product ESX 3.5? The major difference is that ESXi 3.5 has a small footprint of only 32MB and it doesn’t have a service console like ESX 3.5 has. This means that a lot of agents (like backup agents) that rely on the service console to run will not work with ESXi 3.5. However as the product matures we will see more and more support for it. In the meantime you can still run backups as you normally would on a physical server. 

 Here is a link to a knowledge base article at VMWare that also explains some of the features that are not present in ESXi 3.5.

-RP

Windows Vista to Windows XP Downgrade Driver Woes

I have run into  a few people who needed/wanted to downgrade to XP from Vista which came with their laptops when they bought them. There are a lot of good deals to be had with laptops in the big box electronic stores and they all come with Vista pre-installed. In order to downgrade you need to first create recovery CDs so you can re-install Vista later if you ever decide to go back to it. Then you need to use oem XP media to downgrade your license and call Microsoft to activate XP. Of course after doing all of this you might run into some driver issues….

 I recently ran into this problem with the HP Pavilion dv6898ca notebook. On the bottom of the notebook it is also referred to as the HP Pavilion dv6700. However I found out that it’s exact model name is the HP Pavilion dv6898ca. I was able to downgrade the OS, and even found most of the drivers online at HP’s web site. But unfortunately the wired network card driver for the Realtek RTL8101 NIC, the video card driver for the Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS video card and the modem driver for the Motorola SM56 soft modem were missing from the HP web site. I was able to get the modem to work by using the Vista driver provided on HP’s website. But there was no luck with the network card driver or video card driver.

I contacted HP technical support and they were able to provide me with the XP network card driver link at ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp38001-38500/sp38329.exe.   However they couldn’t find a driver for the Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS video card that came with the notebook. I was finally able to get it to work here with the driver from this link: http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BOARD/NVIDIA/NVIDIA-32bit-ForceWare-GeForce-Go-15655.shtml.

I hope this helps out you folks trying to do the downgrade. The moral of the story is to contact the vendor if you are trying to find drivers for a notebook, and if you still can’t find them, Google is your friend!

-RP

The Perception of Managed Services

Being in the consulting field as long as I have, I have encountered pretty much every reaction to Managed Services offerings. Some people openly embrace it and love the idea of a consulting company completely taking care of everything for them, and other people get quite scared fearing for their jobs and don’t want anything to do with it.

 Managed Services (in the IT world), if you haven’t heard of it before, is basically a company providing a service to your business to take care of all your IT needs and concerns for a flat monthly fee. The service isn’t time based typically, instead it’s based on how many users, machines, sites etc. you might have. The company providing this service will usually provide to you a set of service levels for different urgency levels of service required and will provide regular maintenance and support to your company. They will also act as trusted advisor to your company, using their experience to consult with you on which IT direction you should take your company based on your IT needs.

 The Managed Services company not only acts as your “tech”, but also acts as your “CIO” and everything in between. Doing this can allow you to focus on your core business instead of having to worry about IT. Managed Services typically works well for SMB companies and more and more people are starting to discover it. Whether you have an IT team or not, there is no need to fear. Managed Services companies work great with or without IT teams; it just changes the roles a little bit. If a company already has an existing IT team they can use the Managed Services company to provide support where they would otherwise not want to focus their valuable time and effort and instead be freed up to work on more “important” things.

 Managed Services isn’t about taking away IT jobs from hard working individuals; it’s about working with these individuals towards the common goals and success of your core business.

 -RP

VMWare and Snapshots

This is one of those things you learn the hard way. The ability to snapshot a VM in VMWare is a great feature, but unfortunately if left unattended could grow to be a bit of an issue. Snapshots are great if you need to make changes and need to quickly undo them.

However once you take a snapshot, VMWare starts creating another file which is essentially a copy of all the changes that are happening since the snapshot. Once you are sure you are done with your work you should remove the snapshot instead of leaving it there. By leaving it there, the other file can grow quite large and affect the performance of your ESX server. Also if you finally do decide to remove the snapshot much later on, then the VMWare server will have to write all those changes back into the virtual machine. The more time that has passed, the more changes that need to be written. This can also slow down a server and I have even seen it crash ESX servers to the point where the virtual machines were still running but the ESX server itself couldn’t be managed at all from Virtual Center.

So the rule of thumb is to take a snapshot before rolling out a patch or update of some sort, do your testing and then remove the snapshot in a quick amount of time so it doesn’t have time to grow out of control.

-RP

Vista to XP Downgrade on Laptops with No Floppy Drive

For those of you that don’t know, Microsoft provides the ability to legally downgrade your copy of Vista to Windows XP if it’s Vista Home Premium or higher on your laptop. The only requirement is that you have a copy of an XP CD to do this.

However most new laptops have SATA hard drives in them and you cannot access them during the Windows XP Installation sequence. When you try and specify a driver by pressing F6 it automatically asks you to insert a disk in your floppy drive and obviously that is not an option unless you have a portable floppy drive.

Don’t fret, there is an easy solution. There is a program called Nlite that is free to use and allows you to create a bootable XP cd from existing media. What it will do is allow you to integrate the SATA drivers into the installation CD so you have no need to hit the F6 key for the floppy drivers.

You can also integrate service packs and set other options with the program. Goodbye floppy!

-RP

The Confusion with Hyper-V and 32 bit vs 64 bit

Now that Hyper-V is available, I know a lot of people are raring to go ready to try it out. I know a few people have been bit by not knowing the system requirements, especially in regards to 32 bit vs 64 bit so I figured I’d mention a bit about it here.

Hyper-V as many people know is available with Windows 2008. You can also get a version of Windows 2008 without Hyper-V. I suspect this is due to trying to avoid any anti-trust issues. Anyways, the Hyper-V component is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows 2008. This is where the confusion comes in. If one doesn’t read the available documentation clearly, one would assume that Hyper-V works in both 32 bit and 64 bit 2008, but then that person would be wrong. You see the tools available to manage Hyper-V are available in both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows 2008, however you can only run Hyper-V on a Windows 2008 64 bit box. If you were to try and do this in a 32 bit environment it just would not work.

 You can however run a guest os (a guest os is an operating system you run inside a virtual machine) in 32 bit mode inside of Hyper-V. If you want to run a 64 bit guest os you can do that as well. So if you want to build a cheap test box for yourself then you will have to buy a 64 bit processor and build a workstation for yourself and install Hyper-V on that. There will be no reusing of an old 32 bit system to run a Hyper-V test box.

If you do want to virtualize in a 32 bit environment I  suggest you check out VMWare, you can easily do it with any of the VMWare products. Until next blog, have fun virtualizing!

 -Cheers, RP

Check your thermals…

With it being summer, it’s got me thinking about heat on a daily basis. Especially server room heat. I’ve been through my fair share of server rooms and I’ve seen all sorts of solutions to the ever increasing heat problem. It seems more and more applications require a specific server to run; and more and more software requirements state that this piece of software can’t run on the same box as that piece of software. This leads to purchasing more servers and ends up leading to a lot of power draw and more heat in your server room.

Some people decide to cool servers the proper way by installing the proper cooling units into their server rooms, and other people decide to go the old fashioned way by leaving the server room door open or by putting a lot of home based oscillating fans in the room. Unfortunately this leads only to two very bad things, poor physical security and recirculation of hot air over the already warm servers.

If you need to cool your server room and don’t have the proper cooling, you seriously need to figure that into your next budget so you can have it. Also see what you can do to consolidate the roles of your servers so you have less servers taking up valuable space in your server room and also less servers generating heat.

 As I’ve mentioned before, Blade servers and VMWare are a very good idea for server consolidation. Not only are they good for saving power but they are great for keeping the heat down. Also with Windows 2008 out now and Hyper-V, there really is no reason not to try and virtualize even if you are not a VMWare expert. Any way you slice it the thermal savings will be substantial.

 -RP