Microsoft

VKernel accounces Chargeback 2.0 for vSphere and Hyper-V shops

Posted by Brian on Jul 27, 2010 in Hyper-V, Tools, vCenter Server, vSphere | View Comments

The release also adds support for mixed chargeback models. VKernel Chargeback 2.0 now supports both allocated and actual resource consumption models. By reporting on both measures, infrastructure teams can chargeback for actual resource consumption, allocated resources, or simply show application teams the difference in real dollars between their allocated capacity and actual usage. This cost visibility is critical to capacity management, reducing VM spral and supporting private cloud initiatives.

Announcing the launch of The Virtual News – Get your Virtualization fix

Posted by Brian on Jul 6, 2010 in Citrix, Hyper-V, VMware | View Comments

I’ve been building a list of blogs and news sites that I read on a regular basis for sometime now. To this point I have been using a RSS reader that sync’s with Google reader to keep things centralized and backed up in case I have an issue. This works pretty well for myself but in talking with peers about what I’ve been reading lately there seemed to be a need for something the community could use as a central point to find good articles. There are obviously other sites like this for different topics but to my knowledge nothing for the Virtualization segment existed.

So today I would like to introduce The Virtual News to the public. Its in a public Beta phase I would say for now. My dream for the site is to become a central location where the community can share good articles with others interested in Virtualization related information. I look forward to the day that others are sharing great links via the site and I will discover bloggers and others writing content that I am interested in.

I welcome any suggestions or comments on the function, look and idea of the site.

http://www.thevirtualnews.com

How to view Cisco CDP information from a Windows server

Posted by Brian on Mar 31, 2010 in Microsoft, Windows | View Comments

By now most of you should be familiar with how to view CDP details from your VMware ESX server. This can be very helpful when working with your network team to identify what port and VLAN you are connected to. I use this commonly when setting up new ports or troubleshooting a possible network issue. It saves the time of going into the datacenter and trying to trace back the cables.

So this is a pretty easy thing to do on Windows also. You will need to download and install WinPcap and Windump tools. Both of these tools are free and small installs. There are many other uses for these tools, today I will just be covering how to user for CDP captures. One last note before starting is that if CDP is turned off on your Cisco switches you will not get any information when trying this.

The first thing you want to do is to install WinPcap and Windump is just a .exe and requires no install. Not to get a list of all network interfaces in your machine use the following command. You can use this information to choose a certain interface to capture details for. I typically like to capture the information for all interfaces so I do them one by one.

windump -D

Next we can run the actual command to capture the details. Use the command string listed below with the only bit that you will need to change is the -i part. This will allow you to select the different network interfaces that you listed in the previous command.

windump -i 1 -nn -v -s 1500 -c 1 ether[20:2] == 0×2000

Once you run the command above you should see an output similar to image below. I have highlighted the important sections that show the Address of the switches mgmt port, Port ID is the port your connected to and VLAN ID shows you the current VLAN setting for the port.

Memory over commit or Dynamic Memory coming to Hyper-V soon

Posted by Brian on Mar 18, 2010 in Hyper-V, Microsoft | View Comments

In typical Microsoft fashion they are changing their stance on a very popular feature that Hyper-V could not support yet. Dynamic memory or memory over commit will be coming soon to Hyper-V. You can read the MS release here. It talks about the requests from clients to be able to achieve higher density of VM’s on servers.

1. Use physical memory as efficiently and dynamically as possible without impacting performance. Customers investing in virtualization hosts are purchasing systems with larger memory configurations (32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB and more) and want to fully utilize this system asset. At the same time, they’re purchasing this memory to provide superior performance and to avoid paging.
2. Provide consistent performance and scalability. One frequent comment from virtualization users is that they don’t want a feature with a performance cliff or inconsistent, variable performance. That’s makes it more difficult to manage and increases TCO.

Microsoft VECD license is a total joke

Posted by admin on Feb 13, 2010 in Microsoft, VDI, XenDesktop | View Comments

For those of you that have taken a deep look into VDI or have deployed solutions you should be familar with the latest Microsoft trick to milk more cash from corporations. As far as I’m concerned this is a cheap way to charge more money for now added features and pad their pockets because they did not jump into the VDI game.

Ok to explain things a bit more. Basically Microsoft requires you to purchase your desktop license (XP/Win7) of course. But if you want to do a VDI solution using XenDesktop you mush also purchase a RS or terminal services license and a VECD license. This VECD is listed as needed if you wish to run a workstation OS in a data center. This license can cost from $23 to $100 plus depending on what your end point device is and if its covered under Software Assurance. This is all additional cost on top of the Citrix XenDesktop license that you need to purchase.

I was blown away when the Microsoft rep’s were explaining this to us in a recent call. And the fact they can tell people this with a straight face amazes me.