MORE VSPHERE 4.1 UPDATE STORIES

Learn from your fellow bloggers I say... Here is Mike Laverick's upgrade experience and notice is the comments some other issues people are bringing up along with issues he had. Hope to do my first upgrade in lab in a few weeks.

VSPHERE NETWORKING DRIVERS ON HP BL460C BLADES

After spending all afternoon on this one I wanted to share with everyone this tip.

We have all current firmwares on HP C7000 blade chassis using virtual connect. We removed a blade running vsphere 4 update 1 to add RAM. After replacing we get this "no compatible network adapter found" error early in the vsphere 4 classic boot process. It also has the same problem if attempting to do a clean install.

This blog post saved the day, after VMware and HP support could not! Another reason to spend plenty of time on blogs!

In short, you have to rerun the HP Firmware Update boot CD again after taking a blade out of the chassis and it fixes the network driver issue.

Per the blog this effects Xenserver 5.5 as well.

NICE VPSHERE 4.1 UPGRADE PROCESS DOC

This also covers upgrading to SRM 4.1!

http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2010/07/upgrading-to-srm-41-including-upgrading-to-vsphere-virtualcenter-41.html

MORE ON VMWARE MOVE TO PER-VM LICENSING

I found another interesting article with more information on how this will work with per_vm licensing.

""We have the chance, the opportunity, but also the responsibility to show leadership in how licensing should be done in a cloud world," he said during a recent interview. "We need to get better alignment between value received and what customers are paying for."

How it might work:

You estimate your needs for the next year and buy licenses to meet those needs. Over the course of those 12 months, vCenter Server calculates the average number of concurrently powered-on VMs running the software. And if you end up needing more licenses to cover what you used, you just reconcile with VMware at the end of the year. (If you end up needing fewer licenses, VMware won't reimburse you, but as Balkansky pointed out, there's really no need to overestimate in the first place.)

Another factor that may be good about this change as it may allow more companies to adopt an easier pay-for-vm policy.

VSPHERE 4.1 LICENSING CHANGES

One interesting item I picked up on from this blog yesterday on the release of vSphere 4.1 is the start of VMware moving to a per-VM licensing structure. At that blog is was announced VMware vCenter Chargeback, VMware vCenter SRM (Site Recovery Manager), VMware vCenter Capacity-IQ, VMware vCenter AppSpeed would be switching to the new per-VM licensing structure.

Today Virtualization.info provided more info most likely obtained fromwww.itnews.com.au stating the per-VM license bundles will be sold in packs of 25.

It's interesting as recently I was having a conversation about this with an anonymous person inside VMware and it is obvious a change is needed with the Cores from Intel and AMD just continuing to increase. This newer model can help save money on some solutions bringing down the cost of virtualization. It allows you to pay for what your managing and not basing pricing on the physical hardware. in other ways it can help because some products had to be licensed for an entire cluster instead of just the number of virtual machines you needed to deal with.

I have learned the licensing changes will take place in September for these products but you will have until December to continue licensing like you have been or switch to the new method.

Another nice change...the standard edition now includes vmotion!

VSPHERE 4.1 LINKS YOU NEED

As you probably know, the next awesome release of vSphere has been released as expected today, July 13, 2010. There is a lot of blogs and updates on the 4.1 release but some of the best I have found are these:

 

http://vsphere-land.com/news/vsphere-41-the-links.html

 

http://vsphere-land.com/news/tidbits-on-the-new-vsphere-41-release.html

 

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

 

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/vmware-vsphere-4-1-released-%E2%80%93-what%E2%80%99s-new/

NC/SC 2010 SUMMIT-Expert Panel discussion video

If you missed this wonderful event held in Charlotte each year, this is a video Dave Davis (AKA vmwarevideos.com training) made of are very good expert panel discussion. The experts were Chad Sakac of EMC, Vaugh Stewart of NetApp, Scott Lowe of EMC, Mike Laverick of RTFM-Ed.co.uk.

 

The first question to get things started is presented by myself and it really got some interesting conversation going.

 

See the video.

VMWARE STORAGE I/O CONTROL VIDEO

This is a nice video showing off the new STORAGE I/O Control feature expected to be in the VSPHERE 4.1 release. This is the first in several storage improvements I think we are going to see from VMware…and shows why VMware is leader!

 

Check out the video.

NEW VMWARE TRAINING COURSES ANNOUNCED

VMware education has been very busy in 2010 bringing us so far 5 new classes to take:

 

n  Automation with vSphere PowerCLI

n  Manage & Design for Security

n  Transition to ESXi

n  Troubleshooting

n  Design Workshop

 

VSPHERE 4.1 RUMORED RELEASE DATE JULY 13, 2010

http://virtualization.info has announced information they have obtained saying the next exciting release of VSPHERE (4.1) will be released July 13^th. They were the first to leak possible new features in this release and performance improvements expected in the release.

VWMORLD 2010 BACKPACK REVEALED:

Well as VMworld 2010 get closer and closer we finally get to see the backpack that has been selected for this year.

You can also catch a video of this at http://www.ntpro.nl.