Bernd_Nowak's Posts

Hm, I thought it took so long because I'm a fool. According to the documents vSphere Essentials Plus VSA is a vSphere 3 hosts bundle with VSA. And I checked the VSA key is included. But ... See more...
Hm, I thought it took so long because I'm a fool. According to the documents vSphere Essentials Plus VSA is a vSphere 3 hosts bundle with VSA. And I checked the VSA key is included. But if I want a "new" host cluster with VSA I have to upgrade to vSphere full version instead of esentials. Buit according to your answer we might talk about different products? VSA is virtual storage appliance and virtual san is a different product? Sorry for my confusion
Hi all, according to the datasheet it should work with: Software • One of the following: vSphere 5.5 U1 (VMware vSphere® any edition or above), VMware vSphere® with Operations Management... See more...
Hi all, according to the datasheet it should work with: Software • One of the following: vSphere 5.5 U1 (VMware vSphere® any edition or above), VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ 5.5 U1 (any edition), or VMware vCloud® Suite 5.5 U1 (any edition) • VMware® vCenter Server™ 5.5 U1 Now my question is how is it licensed and can I use it with vSphere Essentials Plus or what needs to be done? Thanks a lot
Here's a nice article from Mark Russinovich (the guy behind Sysinternals)  Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs He gives some informat... See more...
Here's a nice article from Mark Russinovich (the guy behind Sysinternals)  Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs He gives some information as well as how to determine how big it should be. Also he wrote why it's not so bad to have it (dumps). Seems old but he covers 2008 as well as 64 bit so I would say it's still valid and gives some nice infos. My conclusion: You can use the defaults or you have to do some work and really have to measure how big/small the paging file has to be. If you have a lot of 2008 R2 webservers it might be a good idea to measure how much is used because of shared storage prices.
There seemed to be phsical Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 in the server but according to Intel they only support software virtualization. Here's the link to the intel specs: http://www.intel.com/cd/ch... See more...
There seemed to be phsical Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 in the server but according to Intel they only support software virtualization. Here's the link to the intel specs: http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/server/processors/5100/feature/index.htm I'm not that technical but I can sense that running nested VM's is not possible with 'software' VT. You can for sure run 64 Bit VMs but not a Hypervisor, VMware Workstation, starting another Hypervisor, ESX and then run 64 bit OS inside the 2nd Hypervisor, ESX. But I'm not that deep into this stuff and maybe someone else can give a better explanation what's going wrong.
Have you applied the latest BIOS update? A DL350 G5 is some years old so it might be not the latest BIOS.
I fail to see the logic why the ex free version should not be like it has before. Contrary, MS Hyper-V 2008 R2 is free as well as XENServer. Citrix and Microsoft both are companies like VMware. ... See more...
I fail to see the logic why the ex free version should not be like it has before. Contrary, MS Hyper-V 2008 R2 is free as well as XENServer. Citrix and Microsoft both are companies like VMware. To be honest I have one customer who asked me about the Essentials 4.x version. My answer, and my feelings about the Essentials (not the plus version) is that it really lacks some interesting features in ESX 4 and also it seems in 5: This quote shows the main important feature which only Essentials Plus still has to offer: Improve application availability with VMware High Availability and vMotion I asked the customer if the centralized vSphere console would help him that much and he refused to buy the essentials. Now, today he is forced to buy the essentials, just to use more then 8GB (or 16GB) . With the minimum of the 2 companies I named, I would call it a bad decision from VMWare. I use Ubuntu LTS version at customers. Same would be with Debian. So is it bad to use stuff @ customers where there's no phone to call. I do Novell and Microsoft and most of the time I had a problem the Internet was a much better solution place then the companies itself. But, I will not say that the VMware support itself is bad. No, in a SAN environment with FC and vSphere as well as View both running the VMware support was great. But most of the time I had problems with VMware ESX/vSphere/View the problems had been solved by an update or sometimes they had been produced by an update But this has nothing to do with VMware. Same happenend to Exchange RU3 and RU4 for Exchange 2010 So no bad feelings against the VMware support but a strange feeling about the recent changed prices and strategy affecting not only the bigger installations but also the smaller ones. We will see. Like others I'm following MS, Citrix and RHEL products more closely. Especially MS because with Enterprise Edition for small companies I have covered the Microsoft license stuff. And with Hyper-V included why should I try to sell more? It's hard enough to sell needed newer servers anyway and if asked what are the advantages of the Essentials version for a customer with 2 or 3 servers without HA/vMotion should I tell the SMB customer that he can use one central vSphere console, which he never will use anyway?
Obviously I like the idea about another licensing schema. Why not prefer this: Hypervisor ESXi free without CPU/RAM limits maybe a host limit Option one: HA and vMotion Option two: FT Optio... See more...
Obviously I like the idea about another licensing schema. Why not prefer this: Hypervisor ESXi free without CPU/RAM limits maybe a host limit Option one: HA and vMotion Option two: FT Option three: vStorage Motion Option four: vShield No CPU/RAM limit. Only limit maybe enforced with HA and vMotion to make Essensentials possible. I'll don't say that I believe VMware is greedy but they might think about the horrors of DL5xx/7xx servers with multiple pCPUs and that's why they don't prefer this schema. But if we, or better my customers, are charged then the best approach still be pCPUs or pCoreCPUs. Leave the RAM out as the current schema don't seem right for vSphere 5 and the current MS OS.Windows 2008 R2 VMs should have more then 4GB as they are 64bit OS. So around 8GB seems reasonable for a 2008 R2 VM, IMO. So 4 VMs already need 24GB. And this is without free RAM for HA and FT. So I'm not puzzled to see a lot of 2 CPU examples here with 128 GB. We're talking about servers or?
While this might be true from my histories it might help the customers which you can put inside these groups: healthcare, government and education. If I talk about the small companies prices are... See more...
While this might be true from my histories it might help the customers which you can put inside these groups: healthcare, government and education. If I talk about the small companies prices are prices and most of the times I can't lower prices for them. On the other hand with nearly no profit for me in this smaller segments, trying to actually 'talk', and not email or voice mail, is a time consuming afford. Not sure about the future but I will watch this carefully. On a side note. Customer now has purchased n Enterprise Plus vSphere 4 licenses with software contract. If the user stays on 4.x can he expand and buy additional 4.x licenses or will every new purchase be 5.x and will enforce the vRAM limits in licensing terms?
Why? Because with Essentials Basic I have a centralised console if I prefer DAS instead of NAS (maybe don't have the funds for NAS)? The only real advantage of the basic package instead of the... See more...
Why? Because with Essentials Basic I have a centralised console if I prefer DAS instead of NAS (maybe don't have the funds for NAS)? The only real advantage of the basic package instead of the free product does not give me as a customer that much more (esxi 3.5 and 4). IMO That's why I would prefer only one essentials which has vMotion and HA. This would be great. With the new 8GB limit however ESXi free is more or less worthless today. And like I said, if I run 4 Windows servers on a 2 * 6 core server with hyperthreading I would then prefer WIndows Enterprise and Hyper-V. IMO But I'm not happy with this as I believe that the free ESXi version gives the customer enough inside view to later add a second server and maybe want to build some sort of HA. PS: In direct answer. Yes ESXi free is used in small business but in my case you would not believe how hard it is to even sell a server and maybe to reduce the current hardware amount. I still have small companies which use servers like an old HP LH4 which is hosting the main oracle database. It was scheduled for next week to talk with the customer to ask if we should try to at least virtualize this and transfer it to an ESXi server. ESXi 5 development in case of licenses seems not that good to me.
8 GB for the free Hypervisor seems so wrong in terms of RAM. Most HP performance servers are shipped with even 12GB so 4 GB not usable? We have some small/medium customers which start their VMwar... See more...
8 GB for the free Hypervisor seems so wrong in terms of RAM. Most HP performance servers are shipped with even 12GB so 4 GB not usable? We have some small/medium customers which start their VMware experience with the free Hypervisor. But due to MS licensing we mostly sell Microsoft Enterprise for those servers which give us one physical and 4 virtual licenses. So in a small environment with Windows 2008 hosts and 2 6 core cpus around 16 24 GB RAM for 4 windows guests seems to be OK. But with ESX(i) free only allowing 8GB why should we use it? If we install a Windows Hyper-V role and up to 4 VMs we can use as much RAM as we want The reason why we tend to deploy ESX(i) one first is that the cost for NAS/SAN and more then one server for HA mostly are to expensive. Add the cost for Essentials Plus or Standard and it's to expensive for most at the beginning. Plus that in this segment and even in bigger ones where people have Enterprise versions either the SAN/NAS storage is a SPOF or the people don't know the difference between HA and FT. But this is OT Would be nice if a VMware member could explain this. I can only imagine that they try to sell the base essential version which normaly have no real usage. OK, you have support and you can manage the single 3 ESX hosts from one console but that's it. Now with the free version limited to 8GB and the essentials allowing 24GB per CPU (48GB on a typical 2 cpu server) you need to buy at the essentials version. Instead of eleminating/restructering the essentials to one product which allows vMotion and HA, creating and deploying a vCenter appliance included in the package, they found a nice way to force those which want to use more then 8GB to buy a version.
From my past I would be assuming it might be a country/date setting (Windows of course) which might be different on the 2 hosts. Other then that I tend to believe that this must be not related to... See more...
From my past I would be assuming it might be a country/date setting (Windows of course) which might be different on the 2 hosts. Other then that I tend to believe that this must be not related to virtualisation but who knows
So a valid way would be to add one host to a new EVC enabled cluster. Then power down one VM after another on the old cluster on one host and migrate it to the new EVC enabled cluster host. When ... See more...
So a valid way would be to add one host to a new EVC enabled cluster. Then power down one VM after another on the old cluster on one host and migrate it to the new EVC enabled cluster host. When one old host has no more VMs on it remove it from the old cluster and reassign it to the new cluster? This would be something we can schedule with the regular windows updates Need to check the vCenter stuff however but this should be not a real problem.
Thanks Troy just asking because I remember a ESX/vSphere upgrade from 3.5 to 4 where after upgrade of vmware tools and the needed reboot the windows hosts have discivered new hardware and needed ... See more...
Thanks Troy just asking because I remember a ESX/vSphere upgrade from 3.5 to 4 where after upgrade of vmware tools and the needed reboot the windows hosts have discivered new hardware and needed a reboot to finish installation.
When I have a cluster and host(s) with EVC and start VMs which had been working without before I assume that Windows will 'notice' a hardware change and force a reboot? Is that all I need to fear... See more...
When I have a cluster and host(s) with EVC and start VMs which had been working without before I assume that Windows will 'notice' a hardware change and force a reboot? Is that all I need to fear? Like I wrote in the other thread it's from 54xx to 56xx where the old hosts with the 54xx will still be used. I need this to be prepared for downtime calculation and what can happen during the migration
I would like to do it the same but limited budget for hardware + vSphere license costs don't allow us do to it this way.
Thanks I thought I need to switch it on
I can't seem to find the answer so it might be answered here more quickly. We have 3 DL380 G5 with E5460 CPUs. Now we need to add more servers. Our Cluster don't have the EVC option on and so I'... See more...
I can't seem to find the answer so it might be answered here more quickly. We have 3 DL380 G5 with E5460 CPUs. Now we need to add more servers. Our Cluster don't have the EVC option on and so I'm wondering if a new DL380 G7 with X5672 CPUs can work together with vMotion without activating EVC. And if we need to use EVC which level must be used? Sorry for the simple question. Any advice is appreciated
I'm talking about ESXi free version with no SSH access enabled which is the default so this is not an option. I know that I can use putty and remote scripts on ESX and that I can use the CLI to... See more...
I'm talking about ESXi free version with no SSH access enabled which is the default so this is not an option. I know that I can use putty and remote scripts on ESX and that I can use the CLI tools with them or SSH. But thanks for the tip!
I have VMware View 3.x and ESX 3.5 u4 enterprise with a virtual center up and running and received my VMware 4 and Esx 4 and vsphere Center licenses. According to VMware View 4.x I can upg... See more...
I have VMware View 3.x and ESX 3.5 u4 enterprise with a virtual center up and running and received my VMware 4 and Esx 4 and vsphere Center licenses. According to VMware View 4.x I can upgrade this product from VMware View 3 on an existing ESX 3 and Virtual Center 2.5 infrastructure and I would then do a seperate upgrade of the virtual center and last upgrade the esx servers. Or would it be better to first upgrade the virtual center, esx servers and then vmware view ? And I followed a bit the documentation here (http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/upgrade.html) and have the following questions: What was the reason to use no license first and instead start the vcenter upgrade as a trial version? Is there a way to test or check the used ports and or user account and password for the SQL services? A lot of questions, I know
Thanks for the answer. Wish that they will rethink it. I did some search for Xen Server and will try it a bit more. Although I love the VMWare products it seems that some decisions are 'strange... See more...
Thanks for the answer. Wish that they will rethink it. I did some search for Xen Server and will try it a bit more. Although I love the VMWare products it seems that some decisions are 'strange' for me. And it's not a 'I will quit' message but for a small customer with only 2 or 3 servers on one physical machine I found no paid version which will suit the customer. The essentials package seems nice but it's 3 physical servers. My small customers are happy with one A small ESXi license with just the remote managment possibility added in the price range of VMWare workstation seems to be the way to go if VMWare really needs my money that bad and don't want to include this feature in the free ESXi version.