Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware buys Thinstall…

Damn what a surprise this is… I never expected that VMware would buy Thinstall. But it seems they’re really going to compete with Microsoft(Softgrid) and Citrix(Presentation Server). I do believe that Thinstall is one of the most promising Application Virtualization tools around. I’ve seen a couple of demos by my colleague Edwin Friesen of Thinstallguru.com and was amazed by the simplicity and effectiveness.

With VDI, the range of Virtual Appliances and Thinstall VMware is definitely on for the challenge. After the speculation of Virtualization.info I dug into Fastscale and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are next on the list.

New VCB features

When exploring VCB 1.1 I noticed some new features. One of the most prominent is the option to run VCB from within a VM. I can hear most of you think what’s the point of that and how about that HBA / iSCSI connection you need. Well if it’s of any use I will leave in the middle because I don’t see any reason for virtualizing VCB for larger environments. But for small environments, which don’t have shared storage this can be an easy way to dump their data without resorting to unsupported scripts. VCB is easily setup via the executable, next next finish. [Read more…] about New VCB features

Service Console redundancy

The last couple of weeks more blogs and topics appeared around the warning VirtualCenter gives when there’s no service console redundancy. Several people posted about a workaround to clear this warning. The workaround is very easy: temporarily assign an additional nic to the service console vSwitch and reconfigure your HA. Notice that I used ” workaround” cause I definitely don’t see this as a solution for the problem. With the current technology there’s not much reason not to have a redundant service console in my opinion, especially when you are using HA. I know a nic hardly ever breaks but in this case probably more than 8 VM’s rely on this nic, the physical switch and the network cable it’s attached to. [Read more…] about Service Console redundancy

VCB problems with independent disks

In my RSS reader I noticed a blog on VM/ETC about independent disks and VCB. The thing is, no snapshots are created when a disk is in independent/persistent mode. This can be a problem when you want to use VCB on all your disks. But this can also come in handy when you want to disable a specific disk from being picked up by VCB. For instance a Database server with a 1TB D: disk is probably not a candidate for for VCB in a normal situation. But when setting the D:\ disk in independent/persistent mode this disk will be skipped by VCB because it’s impossible to snapshot a disk that’s in this mode. This way you can dump the C:\ aka System partition and restore the VM in case of disaster recovery more easily.