Microsoft SVVP Certification levels for VMware exceed all other competitive Hypervisors:

"These new configurations now allow full Microsoft SVVP support for maximum VM sizes on VMware’s platform. They also exceed all other competitive hypervisor certification levels. Kudos to the team at VMware for the hard work on these certification tests as well as to Microsoft for a great certification and support program."

Read the original full article http://www.mikedipetrillo.com.

VMware New Products and Features coming in 2009:

Click the links to learn more:


VMware Fault Tolerance
VMware VMSafe
VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VMware vCenter Data Recovery
VMware vCenter ConfigControl
VMware vCenter Orchestrator
VMware vCenter Chargeback
VMware vCenter AppSpeed (formerly B-hive Conductor)
3rd Party Virtual Switch
vStorage Thin Provisioning @ Linked Clones
VMDirectPath

Best 3 upcoming features from VMware in 2009 poll:

Be sure the visit this great blog and answer the poll (and see the results):

http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/453

VMconverter does Multi-Vendor V2V conversions:

This was an awesome tip from the great VMETC.COM blog!
See this link for the full article!

ESX 2.x
ESX 3.x / ESXi 3.x
Virtual Server 1.x or 2.x
Hyper-V
XenServer
any of the hosted desktop products including (but not limited to) VMware Workstation and Fusion, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Sun xVM VirtualBox.

All that needs to be done is install VMware Converter directly on the VM’s operating system, and then make sure that the source VM has network connectivity the target ESX host. Once you’ve worked those hopefully small details out, VMware Converter is basically oblivious to the fact that the source is not physical hardware and conducts the migration as if it was a p2v. Just choose “physical machine” and “this local machine” as the source type options when configuring an “Import Machine” Converter job.

Interpreting ESXTOP Statistics:

VMware has just released a very nice paper of Interpreting ESXTOP Statistics. ESXTOP is used from the console OS and if often overlooked as a extremely valuable tool. There was an excellent session on this topic at VMworld 2008 that really needed to be two hours in length..but this document looks very nice...so get it now!

Credit for this information goes to: http://ict-freak.nl/2009/01/04/vmware-interpreting-esxtop-statistics/

or the direct link is here.

The Art of VM Templates-thin provisioning-guest partition alignment:

I found as excellent blog discussing this often overlooked art that I suspect many Vmware Admins might miss out on. Guest parition aligment, thin provisioning your templates so they deploy faster...are all big wins in a virtual environment.

For Linux templates

For Windows templates

The parition alignment tips can also be used for the physical world...just run fisk -l to get the proper /dev/XXXX name first.

Some final notes on the thin provisioning:
to convert vmdk file: vmkfstools -i test3.vmdk tes3thin.vmdk -d thin -a lsilogic
to create vmdk file: Vmkfstools –c 10G –a lsilogic -d thin test2.vmdk

IMPORTANT: You will not see the disk space savings with the ls command. Instead after doing this use the du command to see the savings.

In our case a 10gb template converted to thin format went down to little over 3gb...and instead of 10 minutes to deploy only took 3 minutes!

The Most Useful VMware Commands you need:

One of the weakest areas of Virtual Center is reporting in my opinion, and while the Powershell toolkit is giving us ways to workaround this..I wanted to share some simple commands I learned working with VMware support that I really find invaluable.

List out all virtual machines on ALL storage LUNS:
ls -l /vmfs/volumes/*

See all virtual machines on LUNS that start with VPC:
ls -l /vmfs/volumes/*/vpc*
or even better:
find /vmfs/volumes -name vpc*.vmx

Search all LUNS for a particular virtual machine:
find /vmfs/volumes -name vpc*.vmx -print | grep -i vmname

In the above you match up the long string of numbers with the output from ls -l /vmfs/volumes to find the english name of the LUNS shown.

Document VMware ESX Servers for Free!

UPDATE: The author has converted to powershell his script...very nice. Get the OLD SCRIPT or get the NEW SCRIPT at the authors page.

One of my favorite blogs http://vmetc.com/ had this wonderful information on how to document your ESX servers for free. Highly suggest you try this. It produces and very nice HTML report.

Join the VMware 4 Converter Beta Program:

Now is the time to start using and testing the next VMware converter release. It has a long list of new features shown below. Those with a VMware Store acct can get the beta here. Those that need an account go here.

• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu) as source
• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
• Support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
• Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, destination start-up as well as shut down one or more services at source and start up services at Windows destination
• Power off source machine when conversion is finished
• Hot cloning improvements for cloning any changes to the source system during the P2V conversion process
• Target disk selection, and ability to specify how the volumes will be laid out in the new destination virtual machine
• Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type
  Bug fixes described in Resolved Issues and known issues described in the Known Issues section

The following features are no longer supported:
NT4 hot cloning
ESX Server 2.5 destinations