by Duncan Epping
@lamw pointed me out via twitter to the “diy” VCB Management Console. The “vcbMC” is a front end for scheduling and creating backup jobs based on VMware Consolidated Backup. As “athlon_crazy” points out you don’t need to remember all the VCB commands and parameters. You can use vcbMC to browse all your VM’s and back them up according to the schedule you created:
I haven’t tested it myself so far unfortunately, make sure to test the results of the backup.
“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!
Before anyone starts shouting, yes I’m a VMware employee and a VMware fanatic or whatever they call it these days.
One of my customers phoned me up today and wanted to discuss the fact that XenServer Enterprise is available for free. I wasn’t prepared at all which makes a discussion like this very “interesting” to say the least, especially because I’m not a competitive expert.
I answered the customers question by asking a question: Do you really think the product is free and enterprise ready?
The customer referred me to this blog article by Mr. Crosby, the article clearly states:”…will find in XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”.
This particular customer is a heavy DRS user, I’m talking about multiple clusters with each at least 3 resource pools which contains at least 100 VM’s each. The current version of XenServer doesn’t have the DRS implementation the customer currently uses, but not only doesn’t the current version have this feature… the next version will also not have this feature. DRS will be part of Xenserver Essentials, in other words the paid management tool.
I’m just a consultant, I might be wrong… but most of my customers consider DRS to be an Enterprise feature. But it’s actually not only DRS that’s missing from the Free “Enterprise” Virtual Infrastructure solution… what about High Availability? I could be wrong again but all my customers seem to agree that High Availability is an Enterprise feature. Again HA is available, but it has been shifted from XenServer Enterprise to XenServer Essentials, yes the paid version… and what about support on the Free version, can’t seem to find any info on support.
Now I’m not going to tell you guys that VMware has the best product or that XenServer doesn’t cut it in an enterprise environment because that depends on your needs and wants. I do want to stress that not everything is what it seems to be and don’t believe everything you read.
After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.
The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.
Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time. [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design
Most of you are familiar with the VMTN Podcasts by now which are hosted by VMware’s John Troyer. One of the regulars of the VMTN podcast, Edward Haletky (also known as Texiwill on VMTN and Twitter), formed a panel of experts on Security and will start a new podcast: The Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast. Those who listen to the VMTN Podcast know how passionate Edward is about security and virtualization so expect these weekly roundtables to be at least on the same level as the VMTN podcasts.
Info about the podcasts can be found on Edwards website:
Episode 1: First Panel Talkshoe on Thursday 15 January 2009 at 2:30 PM EST / 20:30 (CEST): http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/34217
Expect the following topics to be discussed in the near future:
If you’ve got ideas / topics for the roundtable hit Edward up on the VMTN forum or via Twitter. And off course it’s also possible to just drop your questions during the podcast on the Talkshoe chat. Mark the date in your agenda, every week on Thursday at 2:30 PM EST / 20:30 (CEST)!