Plain Virtualization

Windows 2016 is announced and there are many great features included especially containers support.  One of the major improvement is reducing the number of management console as well which is greatly appreciated. There are also some changes to the licenses. Remember the licensing cost in Windows 2012R2 Datacenter edition  was increased compared to Windows 2012?  Windows 2016 has also some changes not in price but in the way it is licensed stated here .  Refer to Question 7 of the FAQ . Below is the table to see the pricing since Windows 2012 to Windows 2016. Datacenter Standard Windows 2012 $4,809 $882 Windows 2012 R2 $6,155 $882 Windows 2016 $6,155 $882 Taking Datacenter Edition, it seems that from Window 2012 to Windows 2012R2 was the only price increased and Microsoft has kept the cost the same for Windows 2016.  However, there are some changes not known unle...

Like to share this incident which I encounter twice.  Once was during our ASEAN demo lab and the next is one incident that was reported by one user in our VMUG-ASEAN Group in Facebook. VMs started shutting down after 1 hour by itself automatically and on vCenter you start to see memory status changes. Source: VMUG-ASEAN group in Facebook From the above, you see that memory state changes.  The first thing most people thought was there must be some issue or misconfiguration on the vSphere portion. Further checks and view, the host and VM seems to be healthy and this is affecting a majority of VMs.  Further isolation, all these were running Microsoft Windows. The first thing I wanted to confirm was to run a VM that is non-windows to make sure this is not due to OS issue.  Instead of installing one, you can use a tiny VM version small and won't take up much resource from here . The VM runs normal and nothing happens.  This confirmed is not a vSphere ...

With the release of vSphere 5.1 Update 1, all components that has a dependency with vCenter would be updated.  That would include vCenter Heartbeat, Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, vSphere Storage Appliance, vCloud Director, vSphere Data Protection and not forgeting VMware Converter Standalone. As we all know that VMware Converter Standalone is free comparing with other Converter products which are chargeable by per system/VM.  But the reason that most of us would go to other solutions because we have systems with GPT disks or UEFI firmware interface. With the release of VMware Converter Standalone 5.1, it now has new features with the support of UEFI source machines as well as GPT support and many other which you can refer to the Release Notes .  Of course with the new release it will also support the latest OS like Windows 8 and Windows 2012 and file format EXT4. Though this support came a little bit late, but at least now we are able to save a littl...