Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Exchange (2007)on VMware

· ·

I had to prepare a meeting on virtualizing Exchange 2007 on a VMware VI3.5 environment. While searching the internet I found an enormous amount of pdf’s and whitepapers and decided to share them with you:

VMware.com:

VMworld.com:

(You’ll need an account to access the VMworld material)

Cisco / EMC / VMware:

Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell Part 2!

· ·

Yesterday I blogged about the Powershell script that Hugo Peeters created for adding a snapshot Column to your VI Client with Powershell. Hugo used a custom field to show this data and I wrote the following:

Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that this will evolve fast, and I expect some cool additions coming up.

Well I wasn’t expecting Hugo to be this quick, but he just blogged about four new additions:

Total Snapshot Size

The number of snapshots is quite interesting, but even more interesting, is the total size of the delta files all snapshots are occupying. They might be eating up all your precious SAN space. Plus, reverting to or committing a large snapshot is tricky. Add-VMSnapshotSize.ps1

Host Hardware Model

Want to see what models of hardware you are using in your datacenter? You could look at the summary tab of each host. Or run this script to add the info to the every Hosts tab in the VI Client. Select your Datacenter, select the Hosts tab and enjoy! Add-VMHostModel.ps1

Host ESX Version

Did you update all your ESX Servers to the latest version? Check it quickly using this script. Add-VMHostVersion.ps1

Host LUN Count

Last but certainly not least: are you sure every datastore you are using is available to all your ESX Servers? It is visible at a glance when you add the LUN Count to your VI Client! Add-VMHostLUNCount.ps1

So what can we expect in the future? I really don’t know… but my guess is that we can expect a lot more coming up over the next few days.

[update: if any of the links fail, here’s the source article.]

Cool Linux tool: Blueproximity

· ·

One of my former colleagues pointed me out to this very cool tool: Blueproximity. In short what it does, automatically lock your screen when a bluetooth device is outside of given boundaries.

Not only can you lock your pc, but you can also unlock it or kick off any script you like. It should be possible to do the following: Lock PC, set Pidgin messenger to away, mute audio… The list is endless. Read the extensive Ubuntu how to here. Thanks Patrick for sharing.

VMware Technical papers

· ·

VMware lately published a whole bunch of must read technical papers:

Storage Design Options for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Companies planning to deploy VDI face decisions about the use of both local and shared storage,
and in the case of shared storage solutions, choosing between differing technologies available in
today’s market. Selecting the appropriate storage model is important for both performance and costs reasons. Certain solutions require less overhead than others, as do different implementations of the same technology. Costs can vary greatly depending on which storage options are chosen. Fortunately organizations can leverage a myriad of best practices to help drive these costs down, while improving performance. This paper provides information on technical concepts related to storage implementations in a VMware ® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure ( VDI) environment.

VMware View Reference Architecture Kit

This reference architecture kit is comprised of four distinct papers written by VMware and our supporting partners to serve as a guide to assist in the early phases of planning, design and deployment of VMware View based solutions. The building block approach uses common components to minimize support costs and deployment risks during the planning of VMware View based deployments.

SQL Server Workload Consolidation

Database workloads are very diverse. While most database servers are lightly loaded, larger database workloads can be resource-intensive, exhibiting high I/O rates or consuming large amounts of memory. With improvements in virtualization technology and hardware, even servers running large database workloads run well in virtual machines. Servers running Microsoft’s SQL Server, among the top database server platforms in the industry today, are no exception.

Using IP Multi Cast with VMware

IP multicast is a popular protocol implemented in many applications for simultaneously and efficiently delivering information to multiple destinations. Multicast sources send single copies of information over the network and let the network take responsibility for replicating and forwarding the information to multiple recipients.

Consolidating snapshots

· ·

I was just reading this excellent KB article on consolidating snapshots. It really contains a wealth of information and a procedure on how to remove a snapshot of a disk that has been changed in size for instance.

if the disk has been changed in size the following error will show up during the boot process of the VM:

The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created

Read the full article for the solution.