10. September 2008 by Tony.

Last month I had the opportunity to kick the tires of Qumranet’s VDI offerering as well as the SpIcE protocol. I have to admit that the price and performace were rater intriguging, espesscially for a LAN based implementation such as a trading floor or hospitals.

Apparently I’m not the only person they impressesd as they just sold to RedHat for $107 M

Read more:

Red Hat buys Qumranet, sidesteps Microsoft

Red Hat’s $107 million virtualization gambit

Posted in VDI, General Virtualization, Uncategorized | No Comments »

12. August 2008 by Tony.

This problem seems to affect both ESX and ESXi.

The problem is that as soon as the date hits August 12, 2008, all VMs refuse to power on and an error is logged indicating that the product’s license has expired. If VMs are already running, they should be fine; the problem, as I understand, only prevents users from powering on new VMs or performing VMotion operations.

If you are being affected by this bug, then your only real option at this point is to disable NTP (if it is being used) and set your date back a couple of days.

There’s no firm word yet on when a fix will be available from VMware.

Rince, thanks for the heads-up!

Update as of 9AM ET August 12, 2008 Updated ISOs and TARs for Update 2 (let’s call them Update 2 v2) will be available by noon PT tomorrow, August 13. In the meantime, the following workaround should help:

1. Disable NTPd on the ESX hosts.
2. Set the date on the ESX hosts back to some point prior to August 12, 2008. Some people have suggested using the same day and month but a completely different year in the past; this will make it easier to repair ESX log files using search/replace.
3. Set the VM to boot into the BIOS.
4. Boot the VM. In the BIOS, set the date and time properly. This will be incorrect because it gets inherited from the host. This is independent of the time sync functionality in VMware Tools. If you don’t fix this, VMs will boot up with the wrong date and/or time and that will cause additional problems (like Kerberos authentication within Active Directory).
5. After the VM has booted, ensure that time sync within VMware Tools has been disabled. Configure time sync to a reliable source. Active Directory usually handles this for Windows-based systems in a domain.

This workaround is only necessary to power on a VM, resume a suspended VM, or perform a VMotion operation. If all your VMs are currently up and running, just disable DRS/HA.

Hopefully this information will help. I’ll post more information as it becomes available.

According to the VMWare phone support this is being tracked as KB 1006716.

Looks like tomorrow will be a busy day….

From

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/08/11/apparent-datetime-issue-with-update-2/

Posted in VMware, General Virtualization | No Comments »

16. July 2008 by Tony.

Going Green, Virtually.That’s right. No office. No commute. No paper. We don’t require team members to punch a time clock. No spending wasted hours in traffic driving to work just to sit in a desk much farther away from one’s home and family.

Posted in Green Computing, General Virtualization | No Comments »

16. July 2008 by Tony.

The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud
— As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is being more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today. In this session Reuven Cohen will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, he will explain, all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment.

Posted in General Virtualization, Uncategorized | No Comments »

15. July 2008 by Tony.

Citrix Unveils Project Kensho for Creation of Hypervisor-Independent Virtualization Application Workloads
— Citrix Systems announced ‘Project Kensho,’ which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments.

Posted in Citirx, General Virtualization, Uncategorized | No Comments »