Virtualization

VMware vSphere may require a hardware upgrade

One of the things VMware's products allow administrators to do is space out hardware upgrades, but that will soon change with the release of VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere's hypervisor uses a 64-bit kernel. What this means is that vSphere ESX 4 is a 64-bit operating system that requires 64-bit...

Must-have VMware infrastructure plug-ins

There are quite a few VMware plug-ins out there, but which would you really use on a regular basis? Here is a simple guide to the plug-ins I use and why I would not use some of the others. Must haves:

• VMware Update Manager (part of VMware vCenter Server)

VMware vSphere is coming

We're just one week away from VMware's big announcement of vSphere, its next generation data center virtualization product. There is much excitement and anticipation of this new release as it is has been almost 3 years since VMware Infrastructure 3 was released. There are many new features in this...

Virtualization software vendors offer creative pricing — but is it enough?

In a push to keep sales figures up in a tough economy, several virtualization-oriented vendors have announced incentive pricing plans since the start of Q2. Just last week, Columbus, OH.-based Veeam Software announced a program that will allow customers that currently pay for or have purchased...

VMware Tools FAQ

Installing VMware Tools is generally required so that virtual machines (VMs) can fully participate in the VMware memory overcommit features by providing the per-VM memory balloon driver. This driver provides a mechanism for the VM to contract and expand memory (within the preset settings of the VM)...

VMware needs stronger marketing

I used to wonder if VMware even had a marketing department; in fact, I still do. It seems to me that VMware's products are so good and have such dominance that they really don't need marketing to sell themselves. But today there is much more competition in the virtualization space, and good...

Creating an SSH user account on VMware ESX hosts

By default, ESX hosts do not allow you to log in to the Service Console using the root user account via SSH. This is done for security purposes as the root account should generally not be used because it is a superuser account. It is possible to enable this by changing a configuration file, but...

Three new tools for the VMware toolbox

There are three new and useful tools for the virtualization administrator's toolbox. The first is the VMware vCenter Mobile Access Technology Preview. Thought not quite...

VMworld sessions soon available for free

VMware plans to start releasing VMworld 2008 and VMworld Europe 2009 sessions to the general public soon -- for free. Currently only attendees, vExperts and anyone who purchased...

VMware ESX shared disk clusters: Microsoft Cluster Server, Linux, etc.

People often ask about how to set up X clustering on Y operating system with virtual machines. X and Y could be Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) on Windows 2008, Global File System (GFS) on Linux, etc. In either case the answer is pretty straight forward, except when it comes to Windows...