New in vSphere 5.1–Support for five node Failover Clusters
As has been the case with the last few vSphere releases, VMware has crammed vSphere 5.1 full of new features and functionality. I won’t try to go into all of the details since there are many blog posts out there already. Since virtualizing business critical applications is near and dear to my heart, one of the changes that immediately jumped…
Using PVSCSI Driver on Windows Server 2012 VMs
Are you looking to start testing Windows Server 2012 in your vSphere environment and want to utilize the PVSCSI driver for better potential disk performance and lower CPU utilization? You may have noticed that the only PVSCSI drivers available for Windows stop at Windows 2008. But will that work on your Windows 2012 VM? In short, it sure will! I…
Microsoft removes SVVP Support Policy Wizard..and I think it’s a good thing
Microsoft first released the Server Virtualization Validation Program back in 2008 to help validate their products running on server virtualization technologies (both Microsoft and 3rd party). Followed soon after that release was a tool called the SVVP Support Policy Wizard which made it very easy to simply plug in your application, OS version, and desired hypervisor and out would come…
2012 – The Year of SQL Virtualization
Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably seen me say this a few times – 2012 will be the year of SQL virtualization, specifically SQL on vSphere. I figured it was about time to back that up with some facts and some opinions on just why I am so adamant about that statement. I spend a lot…
Microsoft Jetstress 2010 now supported in virtual machines
Microsoft announced on the Exchange Team blog today that they now support running Jetstress 2010 inside a virtual machine. You can read more about it and a little bit of the background on this one at the Exchange Team blog post here. If you aren’t familiar with Jetstress, here’s a two second version: Jetstress is a tool from Microsoft that…
Virtual machine snapshots and tier-1 apps: Not always supported
After seeing a discussion in the vExpert forums and in my own experience in talking to customers, I came to the conclusion that many people aren’t aware of some of the support restrictions around virtualizing tier-1 Microsoft applications. The one support requirement that many folks aren’t aware of is the use of virtual machine snapshots on Microsoft applications, particularly Exchange…
Guest clustering on vSphere: A familiar topic revisited
Yes, it’s 2012 and we’re still talking about whether or not organizations should consider running a Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster (sometimes referred to as MSCS clustering) in a vSphere environment. I know this topic has been written about before by others but I wanted to share some of my own thoughts and experiences around this topic. My focus these days…
Vote for top virtualization blogs–keep it lowercase!
It’s that time of year again – Eric Siebert has kicked off voting for his annual list of the top virtualization blogs. I’m amazed that this year there are over 180 blogs in the list and more from people who didn’t get their blog submitted in time. It shows how much virtualization continues to grow and how great our VMware…
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…