Plain Virtualization

And yes the VMware vExpert 2013 application is now open!  Last year I did a post on what you can do and how I achieve without having the intention to receive any accreditation. You can also get yourself accredited if you do contribute back to the communities related to virtualization and cloud computing. To apply for it go here and remember the closing date is April 15, 2013 Midnight PDT.

As of 1st June 2013, VMware Horizon Suite adds a new licensing type for Concurrent user. With the launch of VMware Horizon Suite , arises many questions on licensing.  Here I have summarize some of the scenarios of licensing which will help you understand better. First we need to understand what is in the Suite.  VMware Horizon Suite comprises of Horizon Workspace, Horizon View and Horizon Mirage.  Each has its own licensing if purchase ala cart. Horizon Workspace - Named User Horizon View - Concurrent User Horizon Mirage - Named User From VMware Product Guide: Named User - Means your employee or Third Party Agent who has been authorized by You to use the Software in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. Named User - Specified user that is licensed to used the software.  No sharing licenses among users. License can be transfer to a new user if previous leave the company. From VMware Product Guide: Concurrent User -  Means t...

With the release of VMware Horizon View 5.2, comes the Feature Pack 1 which allows Web Access through browsers and as well as Touch Utility found on Horizon View mobile client on Android and Apple.  You can view all these nice features from my previous post on Horizon Suite. Today I will summarize some of the requirements to get the Feature Pack 1 installed.  I would not go into much details as the documentation provided on Horizon View are sufficient to do any simple installation and as my previous post there reviewer's guide provide a very detailed step by step which you can refer to. Please note that HTML Access is only enabled for all PC and Mac specific browsers supporting HTML5.  iPad running iOS6 or higher with Safari is also possible however if your iPad is installed with mobile Horizon View Client, the default action is to use the Horizon View Client instead unless it is not available Also HTML Access has only image projection, there is no audio.  F...

With the release of vSphere 5.1 Web Client and Horizon View 5.2 there came about some integration which was not really mentioned and talked about. However for those techies who are eager to try or test out new functionality there is something "hidden" in the installation folders of Horizon View Connection Server and the folder is named TechPreview . So what is this about?  Typically you do not get Tech Preview codes in the public.  This is actually a Horizon View Desktops Plug-in integration with vSphere Web Client. So let us go through the installation guide how this can be done and its documented here .  You can also refer to the Horizon View 5.2 Installation document page 113. As you follow the steps, there are some catchas you need to watch out and I have listed the below for you. In Section: Configure View to Recognize the vCenter Lookup Service Step 2: On setting the JAVA Home the document state: set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Vie...

With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware have announce a new backup appliance based on EMC Avamar.  However there are also some limitations to the free vApp have. Recently Data Protection has release an Advanced version which was announced on the blog . To help everyone have a better understanding of the two I have done a summary as below. Here is some of the FAQ which you can read from here for more information. Below is a summary of the two editions. VDP VDP Advanced Per CPU licensed Included with vSphere Essential Plus and above Included in vSphere Enterprise with Operation Management and above Max deduplicated storage per appliance 3 favours of 0.5TB, 1TB, 2TB Dynamically provisioned up to 8TB Max supported VMs per appliance 100 400 Max appliances per vCenter 10 10 Full VM and file level recovery Yes Yes SQL & Exchange server ...

One of my customer brought sent this this to me and I thought I should share this. Start----------------- After the installation of vSphere5.1 and the setup of vCenter, we started migrating machines onto this new ESX Cluster (we have a 12 node 4.1 Cluster) What we noticed was that when vMotion the VMs from one host to another, we got inconsistent CPU values.  These VMs have clean windows install. The spike in CPU is after it has migrated to ESX hosts 3,4,5 or 6 and when we moved it back to 1 and 2 it went back down.  We were thinking it was doing some work but after one hour, the CPU stays at a constant 20-30% with these processes.  Also the Hosts had only 1 machine running on it so it could not be a lack of resources. Automatically we assumed that it was VMware Tools but the issue still persisted after we uninstalled VMware tools. After much troubleshooting, we found out the cause and it is the power settings of the HP server which has to be set in...