Please see the KB here.

I know there are plenty that will disagree and have found ways of doing it, but within our environments for our MSCS clusters using Physical mode, we disable DRS and only Cold vMotion once the resources of the cluster have been moved off the Node and the VM is Powered Off.

Scott has pledged to continue his already top-notch blogging, continuing in line with his new boss and another great blogger Chad Sakac.

Read Scott’s post on his site.  Read More

Thank you Scott for everything you have contributed and this opportunity, you deserve it.

From KB1016070:

“Note: If you want to install the update, you must download the update manually. The update is no longer available for automatic download in Update Manager and the vSphere Update Utility. You can find the update on the VMware Downloads site and copy the download to your local depot as needed.”

Note:  ESXi 4 is unaffected by this KB.

Read the KB here.

If you are unable to re-write the LUN label, the disk is not READY or not write enabled.  Otherwise, if the label is something other than msdos, it should now be able to be added after following these instructions.

*Warning* Using Parted incorrectly could destroy data on LUNs in use, if not used properly!

Thank you to Rick Blythe of VMware for the link from the VMTN Community site.

Document located here.

I know, that for me, we have run Oracle in Virtual Machines for years now and full support would break down the last barrier anyone has for fighting against Oracle in a VM.  We have asked our Oracle reps many times about this.

Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com has information on this revelation, including an email address to the Charles Phillips President or CEO of Oracle who want to hear from you if you would like to see support increased for Oracle in a Virtual Environment.

See the Yellow-Bricks post here.

Just enter your email here, and then select your Subscription preferences on the link they send you.

This past evening, I had an email conversation with a former colleague who is on the development side of Cloud Computing.  Morgan Catlin, Vice President of IT for Valtira, and I discussed how Cloud Computing is changing our relationship between Development and Administration.

By chance, I just re-read Jason Boche’s thoughts on Cloud Camp Minneapolis that day, which happened to be organized by EnStratus’ George Reese, a co-founder of Valtira.  Some of the comments on virtualization and Cloud Computing, in Jason’s blog post, got my wheels spinning even more.

Some of the major points I took away from all these different perspectives and points:

• Virtualization is much more than a simple brick in the wall of Cloud Computing, however the abstraction of the hardware, software, networks, storage, Administrators that make Virtualization possible and therefore the Cloud allows us to easily downgrade it’s importance in this process.
• Cloud Computing and Virtualization is rapidly evolving beyond Hypervisors and Infrastructure as a Service (Buzzwords) into APIs, Automation, and even Platform as a Service (More Buzzwords).  I admittedly still live and think in a IaaS world, and need to begin to think toward PaaS.  This again will dramatically change how Administrators think of Virtual Infrastructure, and manage it.  Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
• Cloud Computing is changing the way both Administrators and Developers view and rely upon each other.  Scale Out vs Scale Up is a great example, Developers can hit application or server bottlenecks and without any Administrator interaction simply continue to Scale Out their application.  Old days of buying upgrades to Scale Up existing equipment is non-existent to Developers and should be.  This resource management is now left solely to Administrators to handle on the Infrastructure side without any Developer interaction.  I believe this work will continue to wane as Hypervisors evolve, see the next point.
• Administrators will have a change in function and thought coming, there will still be Infrastructure work to be done but as Hypervisors become smarter, more redundant and less interactive we will see a change.  Specifically, hardware will be managed more from an aggregate pool perspective, throw disks and CPUs into the pool and the Hypervisor will determine where and how to best use these new resources for you.
• VMware and Microsoft appear to be the leaders emerging in this market beyond Virtualization; as Big Iron has collapsed, and Xen appears to be floundering.  With this increased competition beginning to focus less on what the Hypervisor does and how it does it, and instead on application support and functionality outside of the Hypervisor.  See VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource, and Microsoft’s Azure.  They appear to be aligning themselves for a whole new fight.

As the Virtualization and Cloud Computing market continues to heat up, and sides are chosen between VMware and Microsoft we will see very interesting developments.  How it will be divided is far beyond my limited insight, but know it is coming.

*Edit* Serves me right for slacking, no sooner than I finally post this and catch up on my Tweets, I find another great article from Massimo of IT 2.0 on this very topic!  Read it here, great article.

*Edit* Adding another recent blog post on this topic from Bernd of VirtualizationPractice.  Read it here.

I absolutely agree with him that ESXTOP -a is useless with Perfmon, the output is very hard to work with and messy.  But I spent some time in the past building a few common counter lists that I use for performance troubleshooting.  Mostly, I find myself using the Physical Disk Latency counters most.  We use a Fiber Channel SAN so these counters are very useful for both myself and our SAN Administrators.

Read Joshua Townsend’s lessons here.

Take the Exam here.