Well now the latest version of Veeam supports Hyper-V! So now for those of you that decide you want to go the Hyper-V route, you have support in the Veeam world!

You can read more about it here.

-RP

Some people are content to use a myriad of tools under multiple panes of glass, but If or one prefer the single pane of glass for my monitoring. Well the good folks at Veeam have developed a management pack that plugs right into SCOM and provides VMware monitoring right back into that single pane of glass.

The product is called Veeam nWorks and it is the cat’s meow. There are other solutions that can achieve similar goals, but in my opinion none go as deep as Veeam. Veeam also has their own custom metrics that they can alert on that make it an even more attractive solution.

Check it out and give it a try!

-RP

Sure there are a few people out there, and some are experts too, but there seems to be a very small amount of people that are officially trained that are available for work. I encourage all of you techs out there to get some training in virtualization and play with it at home. This will get you much needed education that will help you stick out in the work force.

I guess one of the reasons there aren’t as many officially trained people out there is because of the cost of training. Especially after the economic downturn, i don’t know how many people want to spend their money on training. But don’t fret people, by investing in training you are investing in yourself and you will see that come back in the long run!

-RP

Well to start, it comes with a maximum memory capacity of 128 GB of RAM, along with support for HP’s Virtual Connect Flex-10 network technology. This means you can carve up 10 GBe worth of network traffic and virtualize the heck out of each BL495c you stick in your enclosure.

Couple this with a C7000 enclosure which can fit 16 of these bad boys per enclosure and you’re talking about some serious horsepower. Even with the C3000 enclosure we’re talking about 8 blades per enclosure which is nothing to sneeze at.

Granted the server is running AMD cpus and I’m currently a fan of the Intel procs for virtualization but when we’re talking virtualization, it’s the memory capacity that is really going to help you out here. It would be awesome if they released an Intel version of this blade.

You can read more about it here.

-RP

Hyper-V Server 2008 does not have support for Microsoft’s quick migration, has no large memory support, and does not support greater than 4 processors. If you want these features you will have to move to the Windows 2008 Enterprise or higher version of Hyper-V.

The new standalone version supports the VHD format for virutal machines, has Live Backup support to backup your vms and supports up to 32 GB of RAM although 1 GB of ram is reserved for Hyper-V itself. I for one am very glad this product is here as now the competition between Microsoft and VMWare can really heat up!

You can read more about the new version of Hyper-V here.

-RP

That’s right, you heard me, one agent, multiple virtual servers, one physical box. Can I get a booyah!?!?! I told you this competition would be great for consumers! Microsoft breaking into Hyper-V to compete with VMWare has been great for the market. First VMWare’s ESXi becomes free, then Microsoft relaxes their licensing restrictions in relation to VMWare, and now Symantec makes it cheaper for businesses to use Symantec’s backup software if they virtualize.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! It’s about time companies stopped penalizing people for virtualizing and instead start encouraging it! This is a great move and I commend Symantec for taking this step. Symantec Backup Exec is probably one of the most popular pieces of backup software out there and this announcement will definitely help push business in what I believe is the right direction towards virtualization.

 I hope this war doesn’t end for a long time, because the longer it plays out, the more benefits to the consumer it will bring! You can read more about the announcement here.

 -RP

This guy has been working for VMWare for 7 years and is now finally leaving the company. Considering the recent shakeup at VMWare with Diane Greene, former CEO, what does this mean? Obviously VMWare is already feeling the weight of the Microsoft giant bearing down on them and these changes could well be effects of that. This is of course speculation on my part but it does make one wonder.

Up until now VMWare has had the luxury of being able to claim that at least they are a level 1 hypervisor over Microsoft’s level 2 hypervisor. But now Microsoft has announced the pending release of their own level 1 hypervisor product with Hyper-V Server 2008. With this announcement VMWare has got to be feeling the crunch.

You can read more about Paul Chan’s departure here and read more about standalone Hyper-V here.

-RP

Also another area where Microsoft seems to be deficient is with Quick Migration. VMWare’s VMotion allows you to quickly migrate a virtual machine to another ESX host so you can perform maintenance on the original host. Microsoft’s Quick Migration should enable the same thing but people have been running into major issues with it as the process has caused some issues causing administrators much grief.

I recently have spoken with many people who are going the Hyper-V route because it’s “free”. I have to argue that now that VMWare’s ESXi is free, people really have no excuse not to go with VMWare based on their proven track record in the industry. These people are quick to point out the recent debacle with Update 2 but then you can’ t tell me that Microsoft hasn’t royally screwed up a patch in the past either. At the end of the day I still say that VMWare is your best bet at this point in time to keep your servers running smoothly.

-RP

Microsoft has now announced that they have removed the 90 day restriction and are allowing moving of virtual machines between host physical servers for 41 server applications. They call it “Application Server License Mobility”.

This is great news for the virtual world and Microsoft has obviously done this only now due to Hyper-V. Like I said before, this competition can only be good for the consumer. When licensing expensive server application products this can save a significant amount of money in your IT budget!

You can read about this further at these links:

Microsoft Press Release regarding the relaxing of it’s license policy

Microsoft: Application Server License Mobility (word doc)

-Raj

Even the largest of companies can have issues with their Q&A processes. No matter how perfect we endeavour to be there is always the human error factor. Does this mean you should abandon all your VMWare projects and head to greener pastures with Hyper-V and XenServer? I’m sure with the FUD machine in full swing, quite a few people from opposing camps will advise you to do this.

The fact of the matter is that will serve you no good as all of these companies will be sure to run into their own problems at some point in time. Like I’ve said before, if you adopt a proper patch management strategy you can avoid 99% of these problems.

Here is the link to the knowledge base article that outlines the issue and the fix with VMWare.

http://kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html

-RP