Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

MS Virtualization blogs and VMotion

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Recently there was an article published on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog which compared Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities to VMware’s VMotion. (VMblog pointed me towards the article) In the second article the writer responds on a large amount of reactions he had regarding VMotion being superior:

After my last blog I received almost two dozen email telling me that VMotion was far superior for unplanned host downtime and that it was a much better HA solution because it could live migrate virtual machines. I’ve heard this fallacy espoused for many years and, folks, this simply isn’t the case.

In the case of unplanned downtime, VMotion can’t live migrate because there is no warning. Instead you must have VMware HA configured and the best it can do is restart the affected virtual machines on other nodes which is the same as what is provided with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Failover Clustering.

I can imagine why people reacted, in the first post the writer only mentioned VMotion. For unplanned downtime VMware doesn’t use VMotion because when it’s unplanned the VM’s get cutoff and will be restarted on another host with the use of HA(VMware High Availability). There’s no need for a migration when a VM is powered off.

Indeed Microsoft can do the same with the use of Clustering. But can you live migrate virtual machines when a server needs maintenance? No, at this moment that’s not possible. In other words, you will have to wait for a suitable moment… planned downtime, probably after business hours. But in a 24×7 environment will there ever be a suitable moment? Even when your business isn’t 24×7, if there’s a possible hardware failure would you want to wait? But when you have a 8:1 consolidation ratio you probably will not be the most popular system engineer when “quick migrating” the file server or the mail server especially when these VM’s have a lot of RAM assigned.

Besides that, with the upcoming new product, Continuous Availability, even unplanned downtime will not crash your VM. CA will constantly mirror your VM to another host, like a continous VMotion I guess, and when the active host fails the standby host will become active. In other words, no unplanned downtime anymore.

gimme gimme gimme

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Discover a New Perspective with 8.9 Inch Eee PC 900: This new generation of the ever popular PC packs in a whole range of hardware that includes a 8.9 inch widescreen, a 1.3M pixels webcam, the new innovative FingerGlide and 12GB and 20GB storage capacities for Windows and Linux platforms respectively.

Mobility is one of the major factors attributed to the Eee PC’s success; and this is in part due to the use of the built-in Solid State Disk (SSD) technology – which offers a quiet, energy saving and shock proof design for stable computing on-the-go.

Through extensive R&D, the inclusion of the 8.9″ display screen does not affect the overall weight of the Eee PC 900, which remains below 1kg and maintains the ultra portable theme that has become synonymous with the Eee PC. With this large screen size of 8.9″, a resolution of 1024 x 600 is achieved – allowing users to view a single A4 page without the need to scroll left or right and making it much easier and more effective when reading or working on documents.

So if someone feels the urge and wants to sponsor me, this blog is a hint… 🙂

Strange…

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That’s strange I just noticed that a blog was posted that I did not actually publish…. Let’s hope it’s not a bug in WordPress and just me pushing the wrong buttons.

TrainSignal VMware ESX CBT

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I just completed TrainSignal’s VMware ESX CBT(computer based training). Some of you might wonder why the hell I would be checking this course. Well TrainSignal asked me to review their product and share my findings with you guys.

TrainSignal released this VMware ESX CBT. For those of you who never watched a CBT, it’s a video of a training along with some demos and .ppt slides. David Davis guides you during this CBT through the wonderful world of VMware ESX. All the ins and outs are covered. David has a good voice, which makes this CBT definitely more pleasant and easy to listen to. Only thing I noticed that it becomes a bit monotone after a couple of hours. But that could also be due to the fact that it’s mainly powerpoint slides your watching, it would be nice to see the instructor for a change to get more variety. Or spice the CBT up with some questions about the topic you’ve just watched. This way you will know immediately that you understood what was discussed.

The topics range from basic Virtual Machine info to command line stuff like creating a vmfs and even some basic troubleshooting. In my opinion David covered all important topics one should know about, and in a decent way.

Bottom line: It’s cheap, good quality, easy to use and watch. Especially will come in handy when preparing for an exam. Not certain about a specific topic, drop the CD-Rom in and just watch it again. There’s still room for improvement though: it would be nice to see the instructor instead of only ppt’s, no topic list on DVD booklet. In the end this CBT is definitely worth the money and your time.

Before I finished this blog I noticed that Manlio Frizzi also posted about this CBT. It seems that both of us received the CBT around the same time. So I ditched the topic list cause Manlio already posted it…

VMware Certified Design Expert

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Eric Sloof just confirmed my scoop in January with additional info on the certification:

The VMware Certified Design Engineer certification will be available later this year. The certification involved taking several courses and exams, including:

  • Courses
    Install and Configure
    DSA
    Design course (currently under development)
  • Exam
    VCP on VI3
    Enterprise Exam (currently in private beta)
    Design Exam (currently under development)

Once all of this has been completed the candidate must present a defensible design to a panel of VMware Solution Architects for consideration. As you may guess, this is a certification specifically targeted for VMware partners that will be assisting VMware in design and deployment and is only intended for a relatively small audience. That being said, the Enterprise Exam, which has a number of live lab style questions, should be available to the public in the next few months and may become part of a mid-line certification between VCP on VI3 and VCDX. That is also under consideration.

Jon C. Hall Technical Certification Developer VMware, Inc.