VMware vSphere 4 Update 2



By now almost the whole world already know, but if you’re part of those who didn’t I am glad to give you the news, yesterday (10 June 2010) VMware released vSphere 4 Update 2.

The enhancements for ESX/ESXi (Build 261974) includes:

• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.

• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
• Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
• Enhancement of the resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 U2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utility, resxtop. The resxtop utility now provides visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that it displays the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s (guest latency).
• Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04.

For VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672) the improvements are:

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements:

vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:

• • Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
  • SLES 11 (x32 and x64)
  • SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)
  • RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
  • RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
  • RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)
  • Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)
  • Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)
  • Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)

For more information read the release note:

vSphere ESX 4 Update 2

vSphere ESXi 4 Update 2

vSphere vCenter Server Update 2

Red Hat VDI Announcement

Last monday (March 29th) Red Hat have released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, the highlights of this release include:

Virtual desktop support
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.

Import and export
With the 2.2 beta release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can now import and export virtual machine images and templates using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). With this feature, customers can more easily move virtual machine images between environments, publish templates or simply create backups of their environment.

V2V : Virtual machine conversion
V2V is a tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machine images into an OVF file for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With V2V incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta, customers are able to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines created in VMware or Xen environments and automatically convert them into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machines. We expect V2V to be extended in a future beta release to support conversion of Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machines images.

Data warehouse
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

Performance
The maximum allowable memory for a virtual machine has been increased from 64GB to 256GB in the beta, which we believe should allow even the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads to be virtualized.

Read the full announcement in Red Hat News here

VMware ThinApp 4.5

Today VMware released a new version of ThinApp, VMware ThinApp 4.5.
In this version ThinApp applications already run on Windows 7 and is Fully Supported.
There are also a new feature called “Relink”, which can be used to upgrade old ThinApp applications, build on prior releases, to this new release.

Here are the new features:

Full Support for Windows 7
ThinApp now supports Windows 7. You can now package legacy applications from older versions of Windows such as Windows XP and Windows Vista into ThinApp packages for deployment on Windows 7. Avoid costly recoding and regression testing and accelerate deployment of business applications to Windows 7 more quickly and securely.

Relink
If you’ve used previous versions of ThinApp to create application packages, these existing packages can be upgraded to the new ThinApp 4.5 format without the need of associated project files for the applications. This utility speeds up the upgrade process of existing ThinApp packages.

Performance Accelerator
Reduced page file usage for virtual applications and increased memory sharing between multiple instances of applications allows for quicker application invocation and improved application delivery to end users. This helps to improve user experience with ThinApp at the same time reduces network bandwidth consumption.

Registry Transaction Protection
Ensure the integrity of the registry file and eliminate potential data corruption due to crash or system failure by mapping to a backup registry file.

Enhanced Packaging Support Ecosystem
Customers can now elect to share application packaging results with VMware at the beginning of capture or contribute application packaging tips and recipes with a network of community users. By building out this ecosystem of support for users, we will have a better understanding of product usage to provide better product support.

To find more information visit VMware site here

Merry Christmas

To all my family, friends, co-workers, readers, followers, everyone out there:

Wish you all a MERRY CHRISTMAS

Singed by David Fonseca

Update Celerra’s Simulator VMware Tools

I have updated my VMware Workstation on my laptop. Next task is to update VMware Tools inside all of my virtual machines, simple task for almost the common mortals, right?
But, can someone tell me why, there are always one “black sheep”?! This time was my Celerra Simulator VM…
Everything went fine till the moment that I run the command “rmmod vmxnet”, here I got a loop error saying something like this:

unregister_netdevice: waiting for eth0 to become free

This is because the EMC Celerra services are up and running for sure.
After some reboots and try to stop a bunch of services I always ended up in the same error. What I did next? Well if I cannot stop all the services, how about to boot the VM in a mode that those service haven’t started yet?!

The steps were as root user:

Edit the file /etc/inittab. Where is id:3:initdefault: replace by id:1:initdefault and reboot, this way Linux boots in single user mode. No EMC services running

Next I installed VMware Tools, and et voilá now everything went fine with no errors!!

Last step is revert back the file /etc/inittab to is default, where is id:1:initdefault: replace by id:3:initdefault, and reboot.

When the VM restarts we’ll have VMware Tools updated and everything up and running.

Freeware Offers from Vizioncore

At September 1, Vizioncore announced that they will offer “new” 3 products just for free.

“…This initiative is designed to provide you with the technology you need to accelerate your adoption of virtualization. We are shipping free products, based upon our award winning technology, that make it easy to get the most out of your virtualization environment”.

Take a look at what they offer…

vConverter SC (Server Consolidation):

vConverter SC freeware from Vizioncore is enterprise-class software that significantly reduces the time, cost, and effort required to convert physical and virtual machines to VMware^®, Microsoft^®, or XenServer^™. vConverter SC is suitable for all types and sizes of server consolidation initiatives where several or even thousands of physical servers need to be virtualized.

vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management:

vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides multi-VM control and task-based automation to reduce VM administration and improve consistency. Furthermore, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management allows organizations to automate manual and repetitive tasks while enabling a cost-effective solution for high availability in the data center.
Working across multiple platforms, including VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Sun Solaris Zones, vControl gives administrators the power to manage single or multiple VMs one-by-one or simultaneously

vOptimizer WasteFinder:

vOptimizer WasteFinder is powerful freeware product that scans through VMware vCenter Servers (formerly Virtual Center) to locate over allocated virtual storage and misaligned Virtual Machines (VMs). The vOptimizer WasteFinder Space and Alignment Report provides totals of wasted storage and also a potential savings estimate if the space is reclaimed
With this product you can also win up to $5,000 if vOptimizer WasteFinder finds the highest amount or the highest percentage of wasted storage at your organization! For full contest details, please Click Here.
The contest rules can be checked Here

BTW, I said 3 products? Shame on me!! There are 4 products, they also have one last, but not least…

Virtualization EcoShell^™:

Virtualization EcoShell is a freeware desktop application that enables IT administrators to unlock the full potential of their virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments.
The Virtualization EcoShell provides a simple, consistent, and integrated management user interface for creating, debugging and simplifying the management of Windows PowerShell scripts with robust scripting capabilities through an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

VMworld Sessions and Labs Contents

Last 26 August, all past VMworld’s conferences contents (Sessions and Labs) have been opened for free viewing to all VMworld.com members. To access the contents from the last VMworld 2009 conference, held in September,  you need to purchase a VMworld.com Subscription if you were not a registered attendee. All registered conference attendees have free acceess.

The free viewing contents are from:

VMworld 2004
VMworld 2005
VMworld 2006
VMworld 2007
VMworld Europe 2008
VMworld 2008
VMworld Europe 2009

There is enough good information that deserves reading…

Hello world!

Well this is my first post, and if you’re reading this you probably are my first reader .

I’m new to the “art of blogging” so I’ll try to do my best, any help is welcome. In this blog I will be blogging about IT Technologies with focus on Virtualization and all that surrounds.

BTW  thanks for visiting and soon I’ll start post something more interesting