A few of the highlights:

• Be very selective with vSMP only use it when applications can take advantage
• Don’t assign a VM the same amount of vCPUs as you have pCPUs
• Remember to change HALs for migrated physical machines if necessary

I know most of this is taught during the training courses, but you’d be surprised how many installs I have been to that have ignored them.

Always useful to keep in mind.

You can download the installers for Windows, Mac & Linux as well as some extra modules here.

It really does work a charm.

This is one of the most low key announcements I have ever seen from any vendor about something so important to their hardware product line.

If you want some more information about the capabilities of the XIV range then check out these two links:

The Storage Anarchist

Blocks & Files

The need arose from a feature in DataCore’s SANMelody software that allows any modifications of the configuration to be written to a backup floppy for config recovery purposes. This is a great feature that I really wanted the customer to use so I hunted for a Virtual Floppy drive that would allow it to be presented to Windows as though it was a physical device.

I ended up with a fantastic piece of software called Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1. This software acts as a proper read/write floppy drive that can mount existing floppy images and add, remove, edit files. It can also create a blank floppy image and have applications write to it directly.

Best of all it is freeware. Perfect!

The implications here being:

• No VMotion
• No DRS
• Inability to power on of machines that are not already powered on

The solution is to disable NTP and manually change the date to a few days past and then wait for VMware to release a patch within the next 36 hours.

To change the date simply check out this post.

Be careful when changing the time as any Virtual Machine that has the time synchronised with the host via VMware Tools will have the incorrect time applied. You may want to change this option to use either you time keeping DC or an ntp server directly.

Be careful and don’t do it unless you absolutely have to.

Existing Virtual Machines that are already powered on will continue to run, but if they are shut down they will not be able to be powered on again until either patched or the date has been changed.

Storage in VMware

Get More Technical with VMware

Not much more to say, just that they are as excellent as I’ve come to expect.

It discusses the very useful RAMCheck tool in ESX that will check for faulty memory.  I have used the utility a few times and it turns out, courtesy of a reader comment, that it has been removed from ESX 3.5.  I usually use MemTest if I’m pretty certain that a machine has faulty memory, but RAMCheck was always quite useful.

Anyway, have a stroll over to Richard’s blog and check out all the useful posts.

It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

I’m not one for re-inventing the wheel, so here are links to the excellent articles written by 4sysops.

Advantages of Application Virtualisation

Disadvantages of Application Virtualisation

Outlines are below:

Advantages

• Application retirement simplified
• No installation required
• No more application conflicts
• No registry and system bloat
• Multiple runtime environments
• Multiple versions of the same application
• Deploy apps on unmanaged computers
• Simplified OS deployment
• Operating system independent

Disadvantages

• A new complexity layer
• Vendor might deny support
• Problematic apps
• Shell integration
• Bandwidth requirements
• Costs

As you can see valid points for both sides of the argument, I personally believe that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The main stumbling block I see is that companies may struggle to justify allocating resource to this task alone.