Thursday, September 28, 2006

VMware 'miles ahead' of Microsoft Virtual Server, expert says

I agree.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Vizioncore's got VMware's back | InfoWorld | Review | 2006-09-21 | By Paul Venezia

From the article:
The backup and restore process itself is the very model of simplicity. Armed with the root credentials to the VMware servers and administration rights to Virtual Center, esxRanger’s backup method is straightforward: It creates a snapshot of the target server and then leverages tar and gzip to collect and compress the snapshots and the VMDK (VM Disk Format) hardware configuration file for the target VM into an SSH connection between the ESX or VI3 server and the workstation. From there, the resulting tarball is placed onto the destination medium, whether it is a local disk, a SAN, or a simple Windows share. Alternatively, the backup may be directly placed on a file system mounted on the VMware server, be that a SAN LUN (logical unit number) or an NFS file system.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

VMware preps less painful ESX upgrades

virtualization.info reported over a month ago about zero downtime migration from ESX 2.x to ESX 3.x. Now it seems we have a name for this feature, "Dmotion" as well as a bit more detail. I think it would be much more appropriate to call it "Promotion".

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Phil Windley's Technometria | VMWare ESX Performance Report

Phil Windley, former CIO of Utah, had a student do a report on ESX server performance. He reports the following findings from the student:
  • Single CPU virtual machines scale better than virtual machines using Virtual SMP.
  • Hyper-Threading increases throughput if there are a large number of virtual CPUs, but makes no difference if the number of virtual CPUs is less than or equal to the number of physical CPUs.
  • Do not allocate excessive resources to virtual machines. Additional resources may hurt performance.