VMware Hybrid Cloud, allows you to migrate your workload from your own vSphere infrastructure onto another vSphere cloud which is maintained and operated by an external party. Another example is; in some situations, you may need both a local server running specific applications and a cloud service that hosts additional applications, files, or databases. In such a situation, the two are often configured for interoperability.
vSphere 5.5 has been made available for all to download. I am looking forward to testing this new release and blogging about my experience. Check back soon for the write-up.
Check out the following link for all the ‘must know’ information,
http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2013/09/vsphere-5-5-is-here-kbs-you-need-to-know-about.html
What is the impact of enabling EVC on your vSphere Cluster?
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-EVC-Perf.pdf
Basically, the test results show that almost all workloads perform well even when the virtual machine presents an EVC mode that corresponds to an older processor generation. The EVC mode setting had varying impact on workload performance based on the ESXi hosts’ CPU instruction set features made available and their relevance to the workloads.
One workload, AES-Encryption, didn’t fare as well due to a dependence on special-purpose instruction sets only available in younger processor generations.
Great read from http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/09/17/asiana-air-crash-survivors-data-survives/
When Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed at San Francisco Airport on July 6th, we all watched in horror at the wreckage on the TV screens and could barely imagine anyone could have walked away. Amazingly, as details began to emerge, it sounded as though there may be many who made it.
One of the first survivors I saw on TV, Benjamin Levy, would later be lauded for helping dozens of people escape from the burning plane. While some raced out of the plane and others grabbed their luggage, Benjamin calmly helped as many people as he could, saying it was just “gut instinct” to help.
A month later, I received an email from Nicolai Wadstrom, founder and CEO of startup accelerator BootstrapLabs, who I had met a few years back at a tech event. He said:
“So wanted to connect you with Ben Levy, a good friend and also a partner at BootstrapLabs, that was on the Asiana 214 flight that crashed on SFO, he luckily got away in once piece, but his Macbook Air was not as lucky. Fortunately, he was using Backblaze per my recommendation…”
Ben happened to be a few blocks away at that moment and we met up. He talked about feeling incredibly lucky to be alive; said it felt like a second chance. He told me that while some asked him if it made him reexamine his priorities, he felt it just made him all the more grateful for the life he has – where he gets to enjoy time with his family and love the work that he does.
The next day, Ben signed into his Backblaze account and ordered a restore. His computer was ominously backed up right up to July 5th, 2013 at 9:45 pm PDT.
Since he wanted approximately 50 GB of data back quickly, he chose to order a USB Flash Drive to have sent to him via FedEx with his data on it. The next day he had all his data back.
After getting his data back, Ben sent me this email:
“Among the millions of things you have to handle after such a horrific event, having all my computer data backed up with Backblaze was very comforting and the recovery process was effortless. I was concerned for a minute that my computer had not been backed-up for a while as I was hopping planes and jumping between countries for a few weeks, not staying connected for long stretches at a time, but it was, down to the last bit.”
Obviously, the loss of data on someone’s computer pales in comparison to the other tragedies of that July 6th crash. But I am glad we were able to play one very small part in helping at least one person return to a normal life, and we’re sending our best wishes to everyone else aboard and affected.
Benjamin Levy with his data back on a Backblaze USB Flash Drive restore:
Encountered this problem recently while I was migrating a vSphere environment across to newer hardware. I needed to migrate a template across which required converting the template back to a VM, then using Veeam migrating across to the new vCenter, once there I converted back into a template. Also along for the ride were a couple of guest customization scripts which I exported from the source and imported on the new hardware. Easy right?
Unfortunately, whenever I tried to deploy a VM from this template it threw the following error “Customization of Windows guests fails with the error: Customization of the guest operating system ‘windows7Server64Guest’ is not supported in this configuration”. Now VMware does have a knowledge base article on this problem but it simply asked me to install VMware tools. Well, VMware tools were already installed. I found another suggestion here Pepper Crew Blog but that did not solve the problem either.
What ended up solving the problem for me was converting the template back to a VM, powering the VM on then updating the existing VMware Tools to a newer version. Once I had completed the VMware Tools update it had resolved the problem.
Link to VMware Knowledge Base Article: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1020716
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf
VMware vSphere® 5.5 introduces many new features and enhancements to further extend the core capabilities of the vSphere platform. This paper will discuss features and capabilities of the vSphere platform, including vSphere ESXi Hypervisor™, VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), virtual machines, VMware vCenter Server™, storage networking and vSphere Big Data Extensions.
•vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
–Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices
–Support for Reliable Memory Technology
–Enhancements for CPU C-States
•Virtual Machine Enhancements
–Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi™ 5.5
–Expanded vGPU Support
–Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests
•VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
–VMware® vCenter™ Single Sign-On
–VMware vSphere Web Client
–VMware vCenter Server Appliance™
–vSphere App HA
–vSphere HA and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS) Virtual Machine–Virtual Machine Affinity Rules Enhancements
–vSphere Big Data Extensions
•vSphere Storage Enhancements
–Support for 62TB VMDK
–MSCS Updates
–vSphere 5.1 Feature Updates
–16GB E2E support
–PDL AutoRemove
–vSphere Replication Interoperability
–vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention
–vSphere Flash Read Cache
•vSphere Networking Enhancements
–Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements
–Traffic Filtering
–Quality of Service Tagging
–SR-IOV Enhancements
–Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture
–40GB NIC support