Virtualization

Monitoring vSphere adoption: A forum moderator’s perspective

As an active moderator and VMware Communities Guru, I'm in a unique position to see the level of vSphere adoption from an interesting vantage point -- topic activity in the forums. Take one morning's statistics from this past week:

• 3...

Will Google save VMware from Novell-like fate?

There has been some talk recently about the possibility of VMware becoming the next Novell and fading away into obscurity due to Microsoft entering the...

Scheduling virtual CPUs

Recently someone asked me what VMware scheduling is, so I thought I would cover that in this blog post. Scheduling, or virtual CPU scheduling, happens behind the scenes and is not a very visible component of virtualization, but is absolutely critical for virtualization to work properly. You...

The votes are in: Favorite vSphere enhancements

Now that users have started using vSphere, I wanted to know which new technologies in the latest ESX platform release are most popular. I ran two polls on my website, and the survey results are in: 

Virtualizing Microsoft SQL? Consider per-processor licensing

In a recent SearchVMware.com tip, I outlined situations where it does not make sense to have SQL or Exchange virtualized. The bottom line is that licencing depends on many factors, and you...

Three ways to kill a frozen vSphere ESXi host virtual machine

At some point, you may need to know how to kill a stuck or frozen VMware vSphere 4.0 ESXi host virtual machine when the traditional power controls do not work. As with VMware ESX, there are several methods, which I covered in a previous post,

More details on VMware’s Fault Tolerance feature

This week's VMTN Community Roundtable podcast was about Fault Tolerance (FT). Henry Robinson and Karen Ritter of VMware joined to provide information about the development and future of FT. Here's a...

Killing a frozen VM on a vSphere ESX host

Occasionally virtual machines (VMs) get stuck in a zombie state and will not respond to a power-off command using the traditional vSphere client power controls. Rebooting a host will fix this condition -- but rebooting is usually not an option. Fortunately, there are a few methods for forcing the...

The key to successfully virtualized Domino servers

Although there are several tech notes that suggest otherwise, most Lotus Domino workloads can be successfully virtualized. I thought I'd review some of the tech notes as they seem to be discouraging people from virtualizing Domino servers. Both of the notes I'll review blame the virtualization...

VMware’s hardware compatibility list

VMware publishes a guide called the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). The HCL lists all of the hardware components that are supported by each version of ESX and ESXi. This very important guide is divided into different sub-guides, which...