Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

support

vCenter Resiliency?

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After the whole MSCS’ed vCenter support discussion VMware Technical Marketing reached out to me. Lets be clear, the intention of this article is not to change support. The intention of this article is to get an idea of how many of you would be interested in seeing a whitepaper on vCenter resiliency with MSCS/VCS which could be supported on best effort by GSS.

I was asked to figure out what would most interest you. I appreciate any comments around this but specifically would love to have answers on the following:

  • Based on which technology would you prefer to see a whitepaper? MSCS or Veritas Clustering?
  • Would you be looking for a total solution including VMware Update Manager and Orchestrator or just purely vCenter Server? In case of the total package, why?
  • Are there any other components that would need to be included in a whitepaper?

Again, any help / answer / comment is very much appreciated.

ESXi and Boot From SAN support

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Rodos just reported on twitter that it looks like Boot From SAN is supported for ESXi. Unfortunately the KB article Rodos refers to in his tweet, kb.vmware.com/kb/1015000, is incorrect and Boot From SAN is not supported for ESXi. I’ve already reported this internally and hopefully the KB article will be fixed soon. The correct statement can be found in the install guide and is as follows:

Installing on a Fibre Channel SAN is supported experimentally. Do not attempt to install ESXi with a SAN attached, unless you want to try this experimental feature.

Source: ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide (page 20)

For those interested in what “experimental” actually means, read this section on the VMware website.

Oracle feels that not many people want to run their apps in a virtual environment!

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I just noticed the following article by “Oracle Storage Guy“:

Re: Need a favor – Oracle

You are not going to believe this.  Some VMware folks met with Charles Phillips, the president or CEO of Oracle and he said no customers had ever mentioned to him that they wanted Oracle to support their products on VMware.  Or modify the licensing scheme.  He offered if anyone knew of customers who did want better or more support for Oracle on VMware, or virtualization friendly licensing, to email him directly.  His email is Charles.phillips@oracle.com and he really needs to hear that customers run Oracle on VMware, and better support / licensing would be nice!

Apparently VMware provided Oracle a list of customers that wanted Oracle to support their Apps / Databases on VMware and even better change the licensing scheme to one that actually makes sense in 2009. Of course Charles Philips, Oracles President, responded that he never heard about this before. Charles apparently said that anyone who is looking for Oracle’s support or a licensing scheme based on vCPUs should drop him an email. Oracle customers can contact Charles.

Thanks Charles for taking this serious.