I think most of us who have worked with VMware’s VSphere have to come realize that it’s a great product, but it still leaves us yearning for more robust real-time VM monitoring, documentation, and management reporting for our virtual environments. That is where a product like Veeam ONE Free Edition can be a key player in your environment. It has no restrictions on the number of vCenter servers and ESX(i) host you can mange, and best of all it’s free.

VMware vCenter and ESX(i) monitoring – Veeam ONE Free Edition

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vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer provides the capabilities to optimize the performance of Windows for use in VDI environments, with the possibility to dramatically increase the scalability of VDI environments.

Submitted Michel Roth

Quest just launched a new free tool on the vWorkspace Community called the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. It is important to note that this tool not only works for Quest vWorkspace but also works for other desktop virtualization product like Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View or other.

Tests have shown that the impact of the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer can be quite big.

VDI performance -  vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer

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In this part we take a look at how SCVMM 2012 integrates with VMware’s and Citrix’s platforms as well as the new features for patching cluster nodes in a safe way.

There are some key differences in how SCVMM 2012 integrates with VMware’s infrastructure compared to SCVMM 2008. It no longer imports, merges or synchronizes the tree structure from vCenter to SCVMM, instead you manually add ESX servers to any VMM host group.

Integrating SCVMM 2012 with VMware’s platform

When you import a VMware template to the library the .vmdk file is left in the ESX data store and only the metadata is copied to the library. HTTPS is used for all data transfers between ESX hosts and the VMM library which means there’s no longer the need to enable root Secure Shell (SSH) access to ESX hosts to support the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

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This article explains how to troubleshoot orphaned VMware Consolidate Helper-0 snapshots caused by failed VMware backups.

If you are using any of the snapshot-based backup solutions for your virtualized machines—Veeam Backup & Replication and vRanger being the two most popular—then from time to time you are probably going to see a failed backup. This is a common occurrence even with traditional backup solutions, but in this situation it can have a drastic effect on your production environment.

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This tutorial explains how to install a driver on VMware vSphere 4.1 from the ESX/ESXi host or the vSphere CLI.

We recently purchased some new Intel X520-t2 cards for our existing VMware ESX 4.1 hosts. The card has two ports, each capable of transmitting ten Gbps each.

Unfortunately, the driver for this card isn’t in the default set installed with VMware vSphere. Like all things VMware, getting these to work in an existing host is not the easiest of things. During ESX installation, a big glaring warning message is displayed: “If you choose to not install additional drivers at this time, you will not be able to do so later.” Well, that’s not exactly true. To work around this, just follow the instructions below.

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This article explains how to add VMware vSphere 4.1 ESX/ESXi hosts to Active Directory which allows you to centrally manage ESX hosts in the same way as Windows computers.

This past July, version 4.1 of VMWare’s vSphere enterprise virtualization platform was released. Among the patches and performance fixes (full list of new features here) support, Active Directory administrative authentication was added.

So why would you want to do this? After completing the process described here, authentication will be centralized and you will have control over access to the ESX hosts much in the same way you do any other Windows server or desktop.

The only caveat regarding this procedure depends on how you are handling your Windows Server Client Access Licenses, or CALs. Because your ESX/ESXi hosts will be added to Active Directory, if you are using a Device CAL licensing model, these servers would each require a CAL. Most enterprises I’ve seen tend to lean towards the User CAL method, so in that case this would be a nonissue. For more information this is covered in greater depth by Rick Vanover over at Virtualization Review.

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This article compares Microsoft Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and VMware Memory Overcommit.

In an attempt to provide higher levels of server consolidation, both Microsoft and VMware have developed their own solution for higher utilization of Random Access Memory (RAM). VMware’s Memory Overcommit has been available for quite some time, while Dynamic Memory is a new player. How do they compare?

It is always hard to make comparisons like this one. I don’t want to start a fight between VMware’s and Microsoft’s fan-boys. In my view, it is too early to say which memory management technology is better. In this article, I will just compare both approaches.

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Submitted by Haim Chibotero – Website: ITServices The ESXi Configurator is a utility to help manage stand along ESXi hosts. This utility is a GUI interface to VMware RCLI application. The ESXi Configurator uses the VMware RCLI scripts to execute all its function and features. The utility is a GUI application that uses the RCLI perl scripts to perform its tasks. This is a very simple front end interface to the RCLI (command line only) scripts.

This initial release includes the ability to backup, restore and update your ESXi host (epically handy for people that are not using VirtualCenters Update Mangers).

VMware RCLI is required to be installed on your machine in order to use the ESXi Configurator Utility.

I have been using this tool for some time now , and it’s working great , I would really recommend it !

ESXi Configurator Utility

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Update: I removed some of the links in the article because Greg Shields gave up his blog.

Greg Shields published an interesting article that explains the difference between the hypervisors of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX. It is a response to a widespread misunderstanding. VMware supporters tend to believe that VMware ESX has a bare metal hypervisor, whereas Hyper-V runs like Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on top of Windows. Greg explains in detail in what sense both virtualization solutions are Type 1 hypervisors contrary to Virtual Server and VMware Server, which use Type 2 hypervisors. A Type 2 hypervisor is installed on top of the administrative OS, whereas a Type 1 hypervisor runs on bare metal, a layer below the administrative OS (Windows Server 2008 in the case of Hyper-V and Red Hat in the case of ESX).

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I guess there are many IT shops these days that migrate from VMware ESX or VMware Server to Microsoft’s Hyper-V. I believe this trend will continue as soon as Hyper-V 2 for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available. Unfortunately, VMware and Microsoft use different formats for their virtual disk images. VMware virtualization solutions use the Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) and Microsoft uses the Virtual Hard Disk Format (VHD).

The free Vmdk2Vhd tool can help you convert a VHD image into VMDK format. Note that it is recommended to convert a big VMDK file to multiple 2GB VMDK spanned files first. Jérôme Laban has described some other issues you might encounter.

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Earlier, I blogged about attaching VHD images and WIM files, so it is only fair that I introduce a tool that allows you to mount VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) images. VMware’s format is certainly one of the most commonly used imaging formats these days. The VMware DiskMount GUI is not, despite its name, a VMware tool. It is a DEVFRAM product, and simply consists of a graphical user interface for the command line tool VMware DiskMount (vmware-mount.exe), which is a part of the free VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit. As such, you have to first download and install this toolkit before you can use the VMware DiskMount GUI.

When you first launch the VMware DiskMount GUI, you have to tell the tool where to find vmware-mount.exe. If you installed VMware’s toolkit in the default folder, then you can find it under C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit\bin\. The DiskMount GUI supports all of DiskMount’s command line parameters, including those for remote virtual disks (ESX Server and VirtualCenter).

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Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 and Sun xVM VirtualBox are both free hardware virtualization tools that can be used for testing purposes. If you plan to try Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, you should consider using a virtualization tool. Testing in a virtual environment has many advantages even if you have PCs for testing purposes. I guess most Windows admins tend to use Virtual PC simply because it is from Microsoft. However, VirtualBox is by the far the better tool, which is the topic of this article. VMware Workstation is certainly an even better choice if you are willing to spend $189.00. But for occasional testers, VirtualBox is sufficient.

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Submitted by Josh Stephens – Blog: Thwack

SolarWinds free VM Monitor is an ingenious desktop tool that continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines, delivering the real-time monitoring of ESX Servers that you’ve been missing. With VM Monitor at your fingertips, you’ll be able to track virtual server health at-a-glance and ensure your mission-critical apps never fail you… after all, VM Monitor ensures you are visually alerted in real time to any issues in your virtual reality. (more…)

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Reducing hardware and power consumption costs might be viable in some scenarios with virtualization technology although the possible cost savings are often exaggerated. However, there are other factors to consider here.

Sophisticated virtualization technology does not come for free. Yes, there are a couple of free solutions available. However, they have important downsides. The most prominent solution is probably VMware Server. You could run it on a Linux host without any license costs. But we all know why VMware offers this product for free. It is not just because of Microsoft’s Virtual Server. The main reason is that they want you to buy VMware ESX after you started to like virtualization technology. You will want to have more performance, more redundancy and many other features that VMware Server lacks. Of course, this is an absolutely legitimate strategy. However, for most organizations it will mean they will pay sooner or later for virtualization technology. These costs certainly also have to be taken into account when it comes to the overall costs of server virtualization.

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This is my second post in the series about the costs of server virtualization. So, what is it about the “hay argument”: ten horses require ten times more hay than one horse? Do ten servers always consume less energy than one? I don’t think so. How much hay or power is consumed does not depend solely on the number of workers performing a certain task.

I suppose a well-fed sumo wrestler consumes ten times as much food as a ballerina. However, ten ballerinas have a fair chance to floor a sumo wrestler. Power consumption is connected to the amount of work that has to be done. Thus, if a high-end server has to do the work of ten average servers, it obviously needs a lot more power than each of them does.

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