Tag: vSphere
Virtualizing Microsoft Lync 2013
It seems there is a bit of an uproar about a document Microsoft recently released called Planning a Lync Server 2013 Deployment on Virtual Servers. In that document, Microsoft makes some odd recommendations when virtualizing Lync, sync has disabling NUMA on physical servers and not using hyperthreading. To address these concerns, VMware has published a really nice blog post that…
Thoughts on changes to TPS behavior in vSphere
This week VMware released a blog post and several knowledgebase articles about Transparent Page Sharing (TPS). In the next patch for ESXi, TPS will be disabled by default between virtual machines. TPS is the technology that allows virtual machines running on the same ESXi host to share identical memory pages, allowing ESXi to overcommit memory. This technology has been part…
Perception is Reality When Virtualizing Business Critical Apps
It’s been too long since I’ve blogged anything on a regular basis. Sorry about that. I would love to blame it on the three books I’ve written in the last year but that isn’t the only reason. Hopefully I can turn it around and start writing on a regular basis again. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while…
Virtualizing Exchange and Scaling Up
I have to admit – Exchange virtualization is one of my favorite topics. I love talking about it with customers, colleagues, or anyone who will listen. It has a very well known workload profile which makes sizing consistent, it’s virtualization friendly in that it supports vSphere features like vMotion and HA, and I like talking about the challenges and creative…
Deploying a VM with PowerCLI in a Semi-Complex Environment
The following is a guest blog post by my brother Ben Liebowitz. I guess virtualization runs in the family! Follow him on Twitter at @ben_liebowitz. ———————————————————————— Last year, while working at a previous employer, I wanted to make it easier for less-experienced team members to deploy VMs, while making sure little to no mistakes are made. I decided to go…
PVSCSI Bug Causing Exchange 2010 Jetstress to Crash
A few weeks back I was called in to help a customer who was experiencing problems completing Jetstress testing for an Exchange 2010 deployment. It wasn’t an issue of Jetstress reporting failed tests. Rather, they were unable to get through most of their tests without the Jetstress application actually crashing (JetstressWin.exe has stopped working). They would see the following after…
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…
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…