VirtualizationAdmin.com Monthly Newsletter of October 2008 Sponsored by: SpamTitanWelcome to the VirtualizationAdmin.com newsletter by David Davis, VCP, CCIE. Each month we will bring you interesting and helpful information on the world of Virtualization. We want to know what all *you* are interested in hearing about. Please send your suggestions for future newsletter content to: ddavis@VirtualizationAdmin.com Have you experienced the benefits of a Certified Virtual Appliance?
1. Hyper-V Standalone and Free VMware ESX Performance Management ToolThank you for reading issue #5 of our VirtualizationAdmin.com newsletter! Last month we covered the latest news and announcements from VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas. After learning about it, I suspect you are like me and you cannot wait to get a hold of the next version of VMware ESX Server "4.0" (or whatever it is called), for yourself. This month, the world of virtualization has not let us down when it comes to exciting news. Microsoft: New virtualization products launched At Microsoft's Launch event, they announced that they would release both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V standalone in the next 30 days. Microsoft has not let us down and during the month of October, SCVMM and the standalone version of Hyper-V were announced. SCVMM 2008 has a lot to offer users of Microsoft Hyper-V (and even users of VMware ESX). Here are a few of the features:
(For more information, see the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager - SCVMM homepage) I plan to spend more time testing and trying the new SCVMM 2008 features. I am especially interested to see how SCVMM can manage VMware ESX Servers. You can download SCVMM 2008 as an evaluation from the SVCMM homepage but keep in mind that SCVMM is not a free product and that pricing will be released in November 2008. In addition to SCVMM moving to RTM status, Microsoft also released a free, standalone version of Hyper-V - dubbed "Hyper-V Standalone". I thought they might call it "Hyper-Vi", like ESXi but no fancy marketing term has been added, so far. Obviously, Hyper-V standalone was created to directly compete with VMware's ESXi. The two are similar in the sense that they are both standalone, completely free, installed as "your OS" (not inside an OS), and designed to win you to "their side" so that you will purchase each, respective, companies' advanced virtualization solutions. Trying not to take sides, I encourage you to try out both virtualization hypervisors. Download Microsoft Hyper-V standalone and VMware ESXi to judge for yourself, which is the better free virtualization hypervisor. A Gift for Our Faithful Newsletter Subscribers I have got some great news for you, our newsletter subscribers! We at VirtualizationAdmin.com have partnered up with SolarWinds to make available to you a fully functional VMware ESX Server performance management tool called VM Monitor.
All of this information is shown very quickly and is visually appealing - running on your desktop, similar to a Windows Vista desktop gadget. Download your copy of SolarWinds VMMonitor here!
That's not all. SolarWinds is also offering a 30 day trial version of their Orion NPM. With SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM), you can truly know what is going on with your network and servers. Even better, Orion is reasonably priced and offers a free evaluation. Just this month, Orion is now offering performance monitoring of VMware ESX server and guest machines- a must have if you are using VMware Virtualization! Try out SolarWinds Orion NPM for 30 days now! Besides reading our newsletter, I encourage you to stay up to date on the latest in Virtualization news by subscribing to the VirtualizationAdmin.com RSS Feed so make sure you have the VirtualizationAdmin.com RSS feeds configured in your RSS reader. In fact, I will, very shortly, be writing a product review of the SolarWinds VM Monitor in my blog so please stay tuned for that post. As always, if you have Virtualization questions, ideas for articles, or issues to cover in the newsletter, please feel free to write to me at ddavis@VirtualizationAdmin.com Thank you, 2. Train Signal VMware ESX Server Video Training
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3. VirtualizationAdmin.com Articles of Interest
4. KB Articles of the Month
5. Virtualization Admin Tip of the MonthIn my recent article "Hyper-V Integration Services Requires a Newer Version of Windows Vista", I cover issues related to not being able to install Hyper-V Integration Services (the equivalent of VMware Tools) inside Hyper-V. Essentially, the issue is that if you install Windows Vista RTM (with no service packs), the integrations cannot be installed. That would not be an issue but you need the integrations to use the default network adaptor in Hyper-V. This leads to a long list of steps that you must take to get network access in order to obtain the service packs so that you can, eventually load the integrations/tools. To prevent all of this in the first place - just install Windows Vista with SP1 (included/slipstreamed) inside Hyper-V and you will be able to use the integrations/tools immediately! Have you experienced the benefits of a Certified Virtual Appliance?
6. Helpful Links
7. Ask David DavisQuestion What are VMware DRS Cluster Affinity rules and how can they help you? Answer VMware's DRS (distributed resource scheduler) is an advanced VMware Infrastructure Suite feature that balances the load of virtual guest machines across all VMware ESX servers in a resource cluster. DRS balances CPU and Memory among all hosts in the pool. Recently, I had a student tell me about how he had two Exchange Servers, clustered using Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS). Both machines were virtualized with ESX Server and were in a DRS cluster. His concern was that with DRS being fully automated, it could happen that his two clustered servers may end up on the same ESX host, causing them to no longer be redundant if that ESX host crashed. So what is the answer to this? There is an easy solution to this - configure DRS rules to keep these clustered servers separated. This can be done by editing the DRS Cluster, going into the Rules section, and Adding a new rule to keep the specific servers separated. Here is a graphic showing the rule.
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