Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

News

Cisco and VMware teaming up: Unified Computing System

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“Cisco and VMware today announced a comprehensive, strategic original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement which will incorporate product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for datacenter virtualization and unified computing. The resulting combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System with VMware’s upcoming virtual datacenter operating system, the VMware vSphere™, will provide customers with access to a unique and powerful virtualized and physical computing system over an intelligent, unified network fabric”

Read all about it on the press section of the  VMware website or the Cisco website. More technical details will be revealed on this section of the Cisco website. And be sure to read the view of EMC’s Chuck Hollis on these announcements, it contains some valuable information!

VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration by Eric Siebert

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vI just finished reading a brand new book titled “VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration” by Eric Siebert. I was pleasantly surprised by the in depth information that the book contains. The book is based on ESX(i) /vCenter 3.5 U3 and discusses every aspect of implementing and administering your virtual environment including troubleshooting, installation, backup and monitoring.  What ATDG is for 3.0.x this book will be for 3.5 in my opinion!

Eric’s writing style made the book an easy read and the enormous amount of examples, tips and hints make this book a must have for the toolkit of every VI Admin! In other words, pre-order it now!

Hyper9

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I received an email from Hyper9 last week which was kind of surprising. I planned to do a short article last week but for some reason I never managed to write and publish it. Here’s an outtake from the press release I received a week ago:

Hyper9, Inc. (www.hyper9.com), the leading provider of management information for virtual infrastructures announced today that it has raised $8 million in a series B funding round. Venrock, a highly respected venture capital firm, led the round. Joining Venrock were current investors Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments.

The company also announced that Mike Maples Sr., a private investor and tech industry veteran, joined its Board of Directors. Formerly Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Products Group for Microsoft, Maples has a proven track record in advising software companies as they expand product lines and enhance business operations such as sales and marketing. Prior to Microsoft, Maples held senior positions at other market leading companies such as IBM, Lexmark, NetIQ, and Sonic restaurants.

In short they raised an enormous amount of money and managed to get Mike Maples Sr. on board. Mike Maples worked for Microsoft as a VP so you can imagine he knows what game needs to be played to bring Hyper9 to the next level.

Besides Mike Maples, Andrew Kutz also joined Hyper9(Source Boche.net). Andrew is well known for the Storage VMotion plugin he created for the vCenter Client.

I haven’t personally beta tested the upcoming Hyper9 product but it seems promissing, it will probably be released at the end of this month! So keep an eye on their website.

VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview

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One of my colleagues just noticed this new section at the VMTN Community Forums: VMware vCenter Server 2.5 on Linux: Technology Preview. You can find a PDF with a how-to here, here’s  a short outtake:

This document describes how to install a technical preview of the Linux version of VirtualCenter server. The intended audience is developers, system administrators, and managers interested in using VirtualCenter on a Linux operating system.

CAUTION   Do not use this version of VirtualCenter on Linux for production purposes. This release is for evaluation purposes only.

Keep in mind this is only the vCenter server for Linux, not the client! And also keep in mind that it’s for evaluation only, please don’t use this in a production environment! If I can download it I will give it a spin tonight!

VMware vCenter Converter 4.0

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VMware vCenter Converter 4.0 has just been released. Don’t let this name fool you cause Converter is still also available as a stand alone solution for P2V’ing your servers! You can find the release notes here.

So what’s new?

  • Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu) as source
  • Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
  • Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
  • Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
  • Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
  • Target disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
  • Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

I think especially the hot cloning improvement, which copies incremental changes, and the workflow automation are really cool features. These are the kind of enhancements that will make your life a lot easier during migration projects.