Category: Virtualization
VCP 5 Exam–A few thoughts
I took and passed the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) 5 exam last week and wanted to share a few thoughts. There are already many posts that cover the VCP 5 exam and what are good study resources, so I will try to just add a little value around how I felt this test compared to previous versions. For me the…
SQL 2012 per-core licensing clarification
Last month I posted about the licensing changes to SQL 2012 and how it may impact those looking to virtualize SQL. One of the most confusing parts of the new licensing was the limit of 20 cores in a system when using the per-core licensing of SQL 2012 Enterprise Edition. It made no sense to introduce such a low limit…
New SQL 2012 Licensing and Its Impact On Virtualization
Last week Microsoft released their updated licensing scheme for SQL Server 2012, which is due to be released next year. Though there are a number of changes to the product and to how it is licensed, in my mind the biggest change is that Microsoft has moved to a per core licensing model for SQL. The Server + CAL model…
Microsoft responds to VMware performance benchmark report
VMware recently commissioned a study comparing performance between vSphere 5 and Hyper-V 2.0 SP1. The study involves virtual machines running a database simulation workload with 24 VMs (without memory overcommit) and 30 VMs (with memory overcommit). The results show that VMware vSphere outperforms Hyper-V in each scenario. The original performance report can be found here (opens a PDF): http://www.principledtechnologies.com/clients/reports/VMware/vsphere5density0811.pdf Microsoft…
Storage DRS of Exchange 2010 Workloads
On September 15th, VMware released a new whitepaper entitled “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5.” If you are interested in virtualizing Exchange 2010 (or really any mission critical application) I’d recommend giving it a read. One of the interesting things they’ve done in this test aside from scale up/scale out testing is to formally test vMotion and Storage…
Isolated clusters for mission critical applications?
I’ve seen a theme at several customers who are virtualizing mission critical applications on vSphere: The isolated vSphere cluster used just for that application. I’ve seen organizations do this many times when virtualizing Exchange 2010, often dedicating two or three vSphere hosts just for Exchange and related components (domain controller, virtual load balancer, etc). There are several (understandable) reasons why…
Playing with VMware Zimbra for Android
I’m not much of an app user to be honest, and I’m definitely not an app reviewer. I use an HTC Evo (which runs Android) and don’t have that many applications installed. By far the most important application my phone is the email client connecting to my corporate Exchange server. When I saw that VMware had released a Fling called…
My Next Step….
Whenever any virtualization blogger makes a post with a title like this it’s usually obvious what the post is about. So you can probably figure out where I’m going with this. I’ve decided that it’s time to take on a new challenge in my career. To that end I’ve accepted an Advisory Consultant position with EMC and will be starting…
What being a vExpert means to me
VMware announced the list of VMware vExpert awards today and I was happy find out that I was among those who received the award. This is the second year in a row for me which made it extra sweet. The vExpert award is given to those who go above and beyond to promote VMware and virtualization in the community. That…
Fix Partition Alignment with VMware Converter 5.0 (Beta)
I saw the news today that VMware released a public beta of VMware vCenter Converter 5.0 and was interested in the new features. Having used VMware’s P2V tools since ESX 2.x and the days of the P2V Assistant I’m always interested to see how the product matures to make the P2V process easier. Probably the most anticipated feature is the…