VM-Aware

I have recently been researching the best way to implement VMware ESX using NetApp FAS270 storage.

This has led me all over the internet and beyond trying to ascertain whether NFS is a viable option on these boxes that can have a Fibre Channel and/or iSCSI options.

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As you may know I work for Triangle Computer Services here in the UK. We are hosting three events to cover the most interesting parts of VMworld Europe 2008 for all the people that could not make it.

They will take place on:

• 6th March - Triangle Minstead, Hampshire
• 13th March - The Village Hotel & Leisure Club, Warrington
• 2nd April - The Royal Society of Art, London

Why attend?

• Hear industry leaders speak about trends and challenges, including VMware, Vizioncore, Datacore DoubleTake and WYSE
• Visit break-out sessions with key virtualisation partners
• See previews of future developments & strategies

The full invite can be viewed by clicking here.

Another great post on the VMware Security Blog has outlined some of the best practices associated with isolating all VMotion traffic.

This was born out of an exploit being found that allows a hacker to take control of a mid-migration Virtual Machine.

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Yes you did read it correctly, the guys over @ VMware courtesy of the VROOM! blog have published some lab results of Exchange 2007 being pushed on an ESX 3.5 box.

The results are extremely positive and 8 VMs running 2000 mailboxes each are very comfortably served on ESX 3.5. Admittedly the ESX host is an IBM x3850M2 with 4 quad processors and 128GB of memory, but nonetheless impressive it is.

Read all about it at source here.

Here is a very interesting article about how you would go about mounting a LiveCD across the interenet:

http://vamosproject.org/InternetBoot

One day I seriously believe all Operating Systems will run in some derivative of this format.

This one is nice and easy to implement if you are running VMware Player/Workstation on Linux, but it does work on Windows using httpfs. It wasn’t as fast on Windows for me, by a long shot, but it still worked and illustrates the point really well.

Another great tool from the LostCreations team.

This puppy will give an almost full featured (no cut/copy/paste or Public Key Authentication) SSH console tab embedded into the VI Client.

This plugin only works with VC 2.5 obviously, but will allow you to connect to 3.5 and 3.x ESX Hosts.

I have been moaning about the lack of this functionality for years, but don;t have the skills myself to write a plugin this complex. I’m so glad that someone else has.

Brilliant!!!