Virtual Troll

  1. VMworld Europe 2011 goes to Copenhagen again - Eric Sloof from ntpro.nl posted today that VMware decided to keep VMworld in Copenhagen for their 2011 event. Thats great news, as I enjoyed getting VMworld to my home city, well almost. I’m living alittle north of Copenhagen. Read more at vmworld.com Bella Sky Comwell (Hotel) will open in 106 days. It will the largest designhotel in Scandianvia and its just next door to [...]
  2. How to enable Promiscuous mode in VMware vSphere LAB Manager - Do you want to run VMware vSphere in a box using VMware LAB Manager?. Then this article is for you. Hany Michael has earlier last year written 3 articles on how to run a VMware vSphere in a box LAB environment and I won’t go into details on how to install and configure VMware vSphere. Hany [...]
  3. Transitioning to ESXi ~ ESXi is NOT the free version of vSphere. - One of the most asked questions when I talk to customers about transitioning to ESXi architecture is: But ESXi is the free edition? Well, ITS NOT. Actually ESXi is licensed the same way as the classic edition of ESX. It has the same features in each version. VMware has announced that vSphere 4.1 will be the final [...]
  4. HP released a new SAN/iQ version 9.0 for their HP P4000 series storage, which includes VAAI support - HP has released a new version of SAN/iQ for P4000 series StorageWorks boxes, earlier known as Lefthand Networks. This release has the following new and improved features, however one specific in regards to vSphere is huge reason to upgrade, namely the support for VMware VAAI vStorage offloads: New global configurations — Email, SNMP, DNS, remote syslog, and [...]
  5. VMware Cloud Computing (a pizza restaurant?) aka VMware vCloud Director - At VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen, last week, VMware presented a quite nice and very informative video on Cloud Computing, comparing it with a pizza restaurant. Take a look yourself: Following the VMware keynote I proceed to do a LAB on VMware vCloud Director, to see how VMware had built the interface for their vision on the [...]
  6. Welcome to Copenhagen - VMworld 2010 - Welcome all VMware fellows to Copenhagen. I live just a little north of Copenhagen and have been excited about VMworld being held in Copenhagen at the Bella Center. It will be the largest VMworld event outside US, as far as I’ve heard. So today, I drove out to Bella Center in Copenhagen, to pick up my VMworld [...]
  7. VMware vCenter and SNMP monitoring support with Sysorb - I recently had a case at a customer site, where they wanted to use Sysorb to monitor their VMware vSphere environment. I wrote this article, as I couldn’t find any useful information on Sysorb and VMware vSphere together. SNMP was configured on the ESX servers and VMware vSphere MIBS was imported into the Sysorb tool. However trying [...]
  8. Fix: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 - ESX 4.0 U1 in an Active/Active Configuration does Not Failover Using SmartLink - I’ve been troubleshooting a ESX implementation on a solution based on HP c7000 blade enclosure, which had two HP Virtual Connect interconnect modules builtin. The blade server used was HP Proliant DL460c G6. I checked the VMware HCL and noticed some requirements to get this to work on vSphere 4.0 Update 1. Output from VMware HCL: Notice [...]
  9. Eject CD in Lab Manager cause vCenter service to stop. - As i’ve been playing around with VMware Lab Manager recently, I ran into a not so nice problem. If I attached an ISO file to a Lab Manager virtual machine and ejected it again, it caused VMware vCenter service to die every time. Im running the newest releases: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and VMware Lab [...]
  10. Error while trying to virtualise an ESX server as a virtual machine on a physical ESX - Recently there has been numerious blogposts about how to virtualise an ESX server as a virtual machine on top off a physical ESX server hosts. This is particular useful for mainly testing purposes. Check some of these blogposts out: VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself by Eric Gray at www.vcritical.com: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/ VMware vSphere in a box by Hany [...]
  11. Quite a few updates from VMware incl. vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and View 4.0 - View 4 available for download among other updates… The long awaited View 4 is available for download. The earlier version did not support vSphere 4.0 and this new version of View 4 does. It requires VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 which also now is available. So for all that was running View 3.1 in Proof of Concept [...]
  12. My Company, BusinessMann A/S won VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award in Denmark - I attended a local party held by Arrow ECS in Copenhagen last night, and several awards were given out during the party. One award stood out to me, of course, which this blog post is about. My company was nominated in the category of VMware Partner of the Year in Denmark with 3 other of our competitors. The [...]
  13. VMware announces VMware View 4 - VMware has today announced the new VMware View 4 platform for virtualizing desktops on their own VMware vSphere platform. So yes, VMware View 4 has support for VMware vSphere 4.0. It is built and tested on the latest VMware vSphere 4.0 releases It has been a while since VMware announced the partnership with Teradici to use [...]
  14. VMs NIC disconnects after a VMotion - I had a customer calling me the other day about a weird problem. Some VMs disconnected their NIC after a VMotion. It was not possible to connect the NIC back on a again The customer was in the process of upgrading to vSphere, so used DRS/VMotion to put ESX hosts in maintenance mode, so they could be [...]
  15. vCalendar Widget added to Virtualtroll.com - Jason Boche over at http://www.boche.net/blog/ came up with an initiative to create a vCalendar. Its quite nice and if I had a work with a personal desktop, I would certainly try to get one of these. Instead I did the 2nd best option, because Jason also made a vCalendar Widget. I have now added this [...]
  16. Is VMworld Europe coming to Denmark in 2010? - My friend and fellow blogger Eric Sloof over at NTPRO.NL posted a quite interesting and good news today. On the last page of the conference guide, that he received for VMworld in US, reveals that VMworld Europe 2010 will be held in Bella Centre, Copenhagen (Denmark) That is quite interesting and very surprising for me. I [...]
  17. Passed the VCDX Design Exam! - It has been a while since I last posted on my blog and I hope that I will get some time to do some more blogging in the future… Just now I had a great news, that I wanted to share with you all On 4th of April, I headed to London to participate [...]
  18. Blogger profile updated on Nicolai Sandager - Hi All, Back in december I introduced Nicolai Sandager as a new fellow blogger on this site. While he has been blogging some, he has just now finished up his own profile, which you can read here. I work with Nicolai at a smaller IT Company in Denmark called BusinessMann A/S and have been doing so for [...]
  19. Study material for the VCDX Design Exam - I decided to start collecting a list of study materials for the VCDX Design Exam. Remember that VMware will release a separate training course specific to this exam. The Design Exam Blueprint is available here: http://mylearn.vmware.com/lcms/mL_faq/2256/DesignExamBlueprint.pdf The following links to documents could be useful in the study for the VCDX Design Exam. It’s only suggestions and not a [...]
  20. Hypervisor Competitive Differences – VMware in the lead - One of the sessions at VMworld that I missed was Chris Wolf’s: DC15 - Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet, looking back this really was one of the sessions that I really would have loved watching. Chris Wolf is an analyst from Burton Group which together with a couple other analysts has spent 3 month [...]
  21. Video: Brian Madden breakout session on VDI vs TS - I had the pleasure of joining this session with Brian Madden. I have read a whole lot of Brian Madden blog posts, articles etc and it was finally nice to meet him live. I used the Flip, that I got from VMware, and filmed the whole session. I had to split it up in multiple sessions [...]
  22. Keynotes available from VMworld Europe 2009 conference - The keynotes from VMworld Europe 2009 conference is available at VMworld.com Keynote day 1 Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware Dr. Wolfgang Krips, Sr. VP, SAP Managed Services http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/keynotes/1 Keynote day 2 Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D of VMware “The Future of Virtualization — From the Desktop to the Datacenter” http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/keynotes/2
  23. Video from the VMworld Europe 2009 - Party - I participated in the VMworld party in Cannes last night. After a slow start the attendees got pretty enthusiastic when the band entertained at the stage. I didn’t caught the name of the band but they were doing a great job getting people in party mode. Here’s a little short video from the VMworld Party:
  24. A short chat with Paul Maritz - I got a hold of VMware CEO Paul Maritz on his way out from the VMware Unplugged session today. We had a good talk on Quality Assurance and how much focus VMware puts into this. Is it extremely important for a company as VMware, that positions itself as “the” DataCenter OS on the marked, to [...]
  25. Demo of PC over IP with VMware View. - This is pretty awesome. During the key note on stage, VMware demoed which initiatives they are working on in the roadmap on VMware View which is set to go live in 2009. The setup was a thin client running a Virtual Desktop on the VMware View broker on the PC over IP protocol from Teradici. The [...]
  26. VMworld Europe 2nd day keynote - Maurizio Carli, VMware’s Don Corleone, started out today by welcoming people back on the last day of the keynotes, then giving the word to VMware CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod. Stephen went through some performance numbers telling the world what it already knows, VMware virtual machines rocks performance wise. Going over some of the numbers that VMware has [...]
  27. VMworld 2009 - Paul Maritz: VMware initiatives and Cloud Computing - Paul Maritz talked about some of the virtualization initiatives that VMware is working on. IT should be turned into a service that fundamentally should be easier to manage and monitor. The three initiatives: VDC-OS              Infrastructure in the internal cloud vCloud               Extend the internal cloud to external cloud vClient               Client side computing and user experience   The cloud/datacenter VDC-OS as architecture contains: [...]
  28. VMware announced a couple new products and a new name vSphere: - Announcements: vSphere is the new name for all their next generation products’ VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat – high availability for the virtualization management VMware vShield Zones – delivers security and compliance to the internal cloud. A new security product suite. The VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat has really been a long-awaited feature, so we finally can offer high availability for [...]
  29. Live blogging from Cannes, the weather is….. - Pretty awesome, compared to -2 degrees and snow in Denmark, we have sun and about 15-16 degrees in Cannes. I’ve been enjoying a lunch and a cold beer at a café with my colleague Nicolai. Tomorrow the conference is starting for VAC Partners, which I will participate in from 9 AM to 20 PM. It’s going to [...]
  30. Guess i’ll be doing some video blogging at VMworld… - I just got home from work today and on my table a package from VMware was arrived. I excitedly opened it to find out that it was a cool FLIP Mino Video Camcorder with 2 GB built-in memory. This can contain a 60 minutes of video recording in MPEG4 format and in a 640×480 pixels. I [...]
  31. VMworld Labs announced. - VMware announced the LAB’s that you can attend at VMworld Europe 2009. Richard Garsthagen has published a small promo video for us to watch: http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=250 This year all LABs is self-paced giving flexibility to come and go as you like LAB01  Next Generation Datacenter Exploration  Hands-on Lab LAB02  Securing the Virtual DataCenter with VMware vShield Zones  Hands-on Lab LAB03  VMware vCenter Site Recovery [...]
  32. Are you going to VMworld and what do you expect? - VMworld is coming up soon in less than 2 weeks and it is always interesting to hear what will be announced from the virtualization vendors in the week before, during VMworld and after. ·       What do you expect will be announced? ·       And what do you really like being announced? Furthermore, why are you going to VMworld? And have [...]
  33. VMworld Europe 2009 - Last chance to register. - VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes is coming up soon and it is now the last change to register for the conference. I’m attending VMworld my self and I’m exiting to what VMware will announce this year. Could it be the new version og ESX server and VirtualCenter? (VI4) If you want to be the first to hear [...]
  34. ESXi and HA…. - For the last year I have been working with building a VMware enterprise environment for a customer planned to hold approx 700 guests. By the customers wish we went with ESXi. A decision I now, to some extent, regret. One of the things that have been the most annoying is the implementation of HA on ESXi. For stable performance [...]
  35. Merry Christmas - I just wanted to wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year. May the best of luck be with y’all See you in the new year. Regards, Heino
  36. New editor on Virtualtroll.com - I would like to introduce Nicolai sandager, which is joining this site as an editor and co-blogger. Nicolai and I have been working together in the virtualization area in Denmark for almost 2 years. Nicolai is writing up his own profile, which will be available at this site soon. The reason for this introduction is to hopefully [...]
  37. Info and links for VMworld Europe 2009 event in Cannes, France - It is a pleasure to announce that I’ve received a special blogger invite for VMware’s next big event - VMworld 2009 in Cannes. On this site, I will blog before, during and after the event, starting with this post. Dates: 24-26 February at the The Palais des Festivals, Cannes. This will be my forth VMworld event and [...]
  38. VMUG Denmark event - next week about storage! - VMUG Denmark is hosting a user group event next week and there is still a few open slots available. The agenda for this meeting is about storage and 2 storage vendors (Netapp and Compellent) are having sessions about their solutions. The agenda for the meeting is: Agenda: 10:00 - 10:30 Welcome 10:30 - 12:00 NetApp by Jens Melhede 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch and networking 13:00 - 14:30  VMFS, [...]
  39. Updated: VMware ESX/VC 3.5 Update 2 - Bug or Feature within EVC / CPU Masking - I wrote last week on this bug or new feature observation after Update 2. To read my first post about this click here. I have been in touch with VMware to find out if this is a bug or a new feature. They confirmed there has been a change to VMotion CPU constraints. Based on my experience, VMware is a [...]
  40. www.it-experts.dk relaunched - a danish IT community site. - I have been part of a Danish IT community called it-experts.dk for quite a while. This summer I was asked to get involved in running this site with a group of other IT professionals. We have been working on redesigning the site to provide new features for the community and about one month ago we transitioned [...]
  41. Free Solarwinds ESX monitoring utility… - Solarwinds has released a little cool - Vista-gadget alike monitoring utility for ESX server. Download it here:  http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/vm_monitor.aspx
  42. VMware ESX/VC 3.5 Update 2 - Bug or Feature within EVC / CPU Masking? - A customer of mine had issues with CPU masking after setting up a new ESX host. They specific ordered the hardware to be alike with the other 3 hosts in that cluster. So it was the same model both Server and CPU wise. VMotion worked just fine between all hosts as long as the VM [...]
  43. Compellent to Offer Automated Business Continuity with Live Volume - EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn ., Oct. 13, 2008 – Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced it will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume. Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as [...]
  44. Update 3 for VirtualCenter 2.5 released. - This release doesnt contain any new features. It’s only hotfixes in this release, but some very important ones especially in regard of the VMware HA feature (high availability). Also the license server gets an upgrade. Also this update contains a whole lot of fixes for VMware Update Manager and VMware Converter as well. So make so [...]
  45. An ext3 filesystem is remounted read-only by the kernel - problem with certain linux distributions in VMware - Today a collegue of mine experienced problems with a SLES10 after P2V process was done. The VM after a perioed became unstable and the kernel reporting that it was mounted in read-only mode. Hmrf…. Well even he had several Linux guys telling him that it was a VMware issue and after some researching and use of google [...]
  46. Passed the VCDX Enterprise Administration Exam! - Finally I got my score report from the VCDX Enterprise Administration Exam and I’m happy to announce that I passed it. Also my colleague Nicolai passed the Exam. We waited three weeks for the test results.  And after travelling to Munchen to take the exam it was nice to pass the exam. I needed over 300 [...]
  47. VMware has released VMware Workstation 6.5 - VMware has released the next version of VMware Workstation. Download it here: Read the release notes here:
  48. Compellent Awarded Gold “Best of VMworld 2008″ in “Hardware for Virtualization” - Compellent Awarded Gold “Best of VMworld 2008″ in “Hardware for Virtualization” Category from SearchServerVirtualization.com, September 19, 2008 Read more here: http://www.compellent.com/News-and-Events/Press-Releases/2008/VMworld_Gold_Award_080919.aspx?ref=HPPR_0919
  49. VMware announces: Virtual Datacenter OS (Cloud Computing) - VMware has announced the new big thing in cloud computing called Virtual Datacenter OS. Take a look a look here for information on the VMware website: http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/ Also Scott Love has commented on this. Check it out here: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/09/15/follow-up-on-the-vdc-os-announcement/ All of these very interesting new features and VMworld has yet to start. Unfortunately I’m not on the scene to [...]
  50. Using VMware ThinApp Packages with Citrix XenApp - I have yet to try out VMware ThinApp, but I do really like the concepts on it and  the features. I gotta set some time to do some testing real soon. However I found this nice article on using VMware ThinApp packages with Citrix XenApp. Its good reading. What I was first thinking about VMware ThinApp is that [...]