VM-Aware

Chad Sakak has been cajoled into releasing the EMC Celerra SImulator.  It is very simlar to the NetApp OnTap Simulator, except that you don’t need to jump through a million and one hoops to get at it.

The only hoop you need to jump through is to click here.  The downloads are in OVF format or VMware Workstation format.

This is beyond awesome.  It includes the ability to present iSCSI LUNs, CIFS shares and NFS exports.

I think this kind of thing is a huge leap in the right directions by a big storage vendor.  It helps guys like me to become familiar with the products without having to spend a whole lot of money for test & dev.

Thanks Chad

ICT Freak have posted about how to use a connection to the VirtualCenter SQL Server database from Excel to display useful VMotion information.

Check out article here.

Rich Bramley has written a very good article about VMFS storage performance advisories.  Some of them are the kind of things you would do if you had an absolutely perfect storage setup, but some are just great guidelines to follow.

Rich has a real habit of writing some excellent real world articles, so go and check out vmetc.com if you can.

I know what it’s like trying to make sure that my customer’s network admin guys happy when implementing Virtual Infrastructure.

Cisco & VMware have collaborated on a fantastic document that really gives some great pointers covering:

• vLAN Tagging
• NIC Teaming
• vSwitch Scalability
• Layer 2 Security Features

Used in conjunction with the Virtual Networking Concepts document it makes for compelling reading for network admins prior to any serious discussions about VMware and its impact on networking infrastructure.