Saturday, October 26, 2013

Where VMware does get a beat down from Hyper-V?

Where VMware does get a beat down from Hyper-V?
I am trying to put down my personal opinion where Hyper-V is gaining ground in the virtualization war at the Pre-Sales meetings that I have sat down. I think the views are important since it is we Pre-Sales Engineers who are at the forefront who are presenting the Pros and Cons of technology.  I was involved in an unbiased discussion (even though I would love to be biased towards VMware) in front of the customer which technology can compensate the business and a cost comparison.
Please note that these views are mostly when I sat at SMB customer discussions. It might be unfair to compare the vSphere Essentials Kits to the System Center Suite. But that’s the customer.
These views might differ from one geographical location to another. But simply put I would personally love to see VMware stay abreast in the game of Virtualization.
Sometimes you cannot do the same thing or say the same thing all over a long period. But making the correct moves and making those moves at the correct time is key.
1. Bundled comprehensive Backup Solution
This is an area of concern where VMware gets a beat down in my opinion where customers tend to think that they get a full Backup Solution for free when they purchase the System Center Suite.
As a Pre-Sales engineer I would love to say “VMware is not a backup vendor” but to realize the vision of “Software Defined Data Centre” a good backup solution is of paramount importance. The experience of VDP 5.1 was not so great. It cannot take backups to the tape drive. Whether we like it or not Customer’s love the word “FREE”. That’s where Microsoft scoring points. I would love to see VDP free edition would solve this problem, or I personally think acquisition of VEEAM will be a great move. (My sole crazy opinion)
2. Customers still buying the “Config Maximum” numbers
Hyper-V might not really be capable of delivering the maximum’s they state, and customers might not even need that kind of monster VM configurations. Still those increased numbers are a buying point for customers  for some reason.
Customers are now smart enough to get the datasheets from the respective websites to compare with the two hypervisors.
3. Like it or not Customers love the word “FREE”
The System Center Suite is appealing to customers since they see as if with one cost they get all other System Center products for FREE. May be its time to see that along with vCenter the Operations Management Suite, Site Recovery Manager, Security and Networking has to be bundled to one package and give out the bundled product as vCenter Management Suite. (I know its not practical but that’s where Microsoft is gaining in my opinion.)
Even though I hate to see this it’s quite appealing to see that you are getting so much more for one price.
  • Operations Manager
  • Configuration Manager
  • Data Protection Manager
  • Service Manager
  • Virtual Machine Manager
  • Endpoint Protection
  • Orchestrator
  • App Controller
I would wish to iterate that the  above post was my sole personal views and I only want VMware to stay ahead of all other Hypervisor or Virtualization solutions out in the market.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

How to get hardware info through ESXi

Have u ever come across where you desperately need some hardware level information of an ESXi host. I did!

I was asked to get how many memory modules were plugged in DIMM slots. My colleague came up saying there is a Linux command to get the info if it was a Linux host.

# dmidecode | less


It works for ESX versions from 3.x to 4.x

But the above command wont work for ESXi versions and has been replaced with below command

# smbiosDump | less

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Accessing ESXi Direct Console from an SSH (putty) session

I know this is an old trick, but for those who didnt know how to access the ESXi Direct Console (DCUI) from an SSH session to the host.

Here's how you do it



And voila!



does it look like a familiar screen to you? 

P.S: Ctrl + C to exit out of the screen and resume to your SSH session (If you are using putty)

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Amazingly VMware virtual machine powers up with 255 chained snapshots

I thought of sharing an amazing experience with you which took 2 sleepless nights to rectify the issue.

Not because of anything the only downtime we could get is after hours.

I was responsible in rectifying a vm with whopping 255 snapshots that was created with the backup software.

The VMware Global Support Tech stated he has only seen 234 snapshots in his career of support.

Yet the vm would power on the but it was dead slow.

This goes on to show the stability of VMware vSphere Hypervisor.


VDP 5.1 and SRM 5.1 Interoperability

One of the customers I worked for VDP 5.1 and SRM 5.1 running together on the same environment. and caused a vm to run enormous amount of snapshots. VDP caused to lockout the vm after an unsuccessful backup attempt and which causes vMotion and Storage vmotion not to work.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2008957

VMware Global support then claimed that VDP 5.1 and SRM 5.1 is not in the interoperability list. They have only bought in interoperability from 5.5 onwards.

Dont take my word for it, please go check for yourself

http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/sim/interop_matrix.php