Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

VMware Studio 2.0

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There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.

DIY Patch for VMware Workstation 6.5.1 on Linux 2.6.29 kernel

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I’m running OpenSuse as my primary OS at the moment. One of the problems I had was getting VMware Workstation to work in a normal way. The problem was that the kernel modules weren’t compiled correctly. It’s been bugging me ever since, but due to the fact that it’s the end of the quarter I never had the time to actually look in to it. Luckily VMTN user Krellan did have some extra time on his hands and managed to fix the problem, Thanks!!

Fixing your broken installation is fairly easy:

To use this patch, download it from the attachment, gunzip it, then go to your /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source directory. Untar all of the files. Apply the patch with “patch -p1”. After the patch has applied, re-tar all the files. Then, run “vmware-modconfig –console –install-all” again, under Linux 2.6.29, and it should now work.

Go to the VMTN Forums and download the patch if you are having trouble getting the VMware Workstation kernel modules compiled correctly!

VCB Management Console 1.0.6 Beta

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@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 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!

XenServer Enterprise for free?

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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.