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…
Clearing up confusion regarding HA/vMotion support for Exchange 2010
As I discussed last week, Microsoft has updated their guidance and support regarding hypervisor high availability and live migration technologies with Exchange 2010. This is welcome news for anyone looking to virtualize Exchange 2010 on vSphere, as it now allows you to take advantage of vMotion and HA on all Exchange servers, even those in a Database Availability Group (DAG).…
vSphere and Exchange admins can live in harmony – Microsoft finally supports HA and vMotion
This Saturday, Microsoft published a new white paper entitled “Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V” that provides a lot of great info that is applicable to VMware as well. One of the most important things in this entire document is a change in policy regarding supporting virtualized Exchange 2010 with Database Availability…
VMware conducting vCenter high availability survey
This week on VMware’s Uptime Blog I noticed a new post asking for customer feedback about vCenter high availability requirements. To that end, VMware has posted a survey for customers to fill out to get more information. To be clear, the survey addresses high availability of the vCenter server itself and does not relate to VMware’s HA feature that is…
VMware Tools Shrink Option Unavailable?
In my recent post on using svMotion to reclaim disk space, I talked about using SDelete to zero out blocks for free space reclamation. Another way to do this is to use the Shrink option which is part of the VMware Tools. Duncan’s post here gives details on using the VMware Tools Shrink option so I won’t go into much…