Dell announced yesterday that ESXi will cost only $99. (source: virtualization.info) Citrix Xenserver will cost you $299. I’m really curious how HP, IBM and Fujitsu are going to respond to this. And what is Microsoft going to do with this very competitive pricing. Anyway, what ever happens Dell and VMware just woke everybody up and the customers are definitely the one who will benefit!
VMware
New VMware certification available within a month!
Gerben just blogged about it, and I blogged about it several times over the last couple of months but as of next month the new certification is available:
source
The VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) on VMware Infrastructure 3 is an advanced certification developed for design architects of VMware enterprise deployments.There are four core validation components to achieve VCDX.
(1) Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3.
(2) Pass the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam. Includes live labs and tests a higher level of skill set than the exam for VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3.
(3) Pass the VMware Design Exam. This exam focuses on actual design scenarios and contains simulations and situational questions.
(4) Submit, present and defend a successful VMware Infrastructure design and implementation plan.
Blueprint
Cisco port-channel configuration for VMware
My colleague Rene Jorissen just posted a config example for a port-channel and trunk configuration for VMware. So for those interested in networking check it out.
VCB and Solaris 32 Bit VM’s
One of my readers just emailed me the following, again thanks for this info which might me useful to any of you guys out there playing with VCB:
Today with the help of VMware Support I solved a strange problem.
With all my Solaris10-32Bit VM’ s I was getting an error, when I tried to backup them via VCB. Creating snapshot of the VM failed with “Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the (user-supplied) custom pre-freeze script in the virtual machine exited with a non-zero return code”. But there doesn’t exists a pre or post script in all of the VMs.So as you know, no snapshot means no backup of this VM. I monitored the hostd of the host, where the VM is running. There I saw this messages: ” Could not run custom freeze/thaw operation: Insufficient permissions in guest operating system”.
VMware support told me, that there is a problem within the VMTools in the Solaris VM’s. They know about this problem (I didn’t find anything about this in the internet) and will solve it in a future patch.
For now, the only way is to use the “-Q 0” switch with the vcbmounter command. This way VCB will ignore any pre or post scripts.
Christoph P.
So in short, -Q 0 disregards any pre or post scripts. Thanks Christoph for contributing to my blog!
Show VMware Tools version with BGInfo
Arne blogged about a cool feature of BGInfo yesterday, but his post is in dutch so it’s not on the Planet V12 RSS feed which is a shame cause it’s definitely usefull info.
In short: BGInfo is a handy little SysInternals tool which sets a desktop wallpaper with pre-defined info like total memory, disk info, ip info etc. With BGInfo it’s also possible to define a specific field with for instance the version information of a file. Arne discovered that it’s possible to point towards the VMware tools executable and display the VMware tools version on your server desktop aka wallpaper.
I guess a picture says more than words: