Plain Virtualization

Few months back there were reports of Windows 2008 R2 and Solaris 10 running 64-bit experiencing BSOD or kernel panic running vSphere 5.x.  Some of my customers were also impacted by this issues.  With VMware Support, they identified that there are experiencing servers that are on Intel E5 v2 series processors. VMware was fast and release a temporary fix to use Software MMU however this is not beneficial as this increase the CPU and memory requirements on certain applications. So the server vendors with VMware and Intel must have gone through lots of testing and have release the updated KB2073791 .  The temporary fix will still applies if your server vendors does not have an updated BIOS upgrade to make some changes to resolve this issues. If you refer to page 50 in the document stated in the KB 2703791 , CA135 is the known issue as a release document from Intel.  Since a processor cannot be altered, a fixed is provided via the server vendors BIOS. Interesti...

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 ...

The release of the vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager allows vCenter 5.1 to be able to manage Hyper-V 2 servers based on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2. I decide to give it a try so I install a nested Hyper-V2 server and try to create a Windows XP VM it.  However I receive the following error: Description: The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to start the virtual machine '%machinename%' because one of the Hyper-V components is not running (Virtual machine ID %ID_of_the_virtual_machine%). Apparently, I would need to add in this advanced setting to the vmx file which I can also use the web client to add that. hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE" After adding that, my Hyper-V VM is able to start up. Now let's head back to vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager.  This is a 1.0 release so do not expect too much on it.  This can be found in your normal vCenter download page. Please note that this plug-in is only available for vCenter Standard edition.  vCe...