First experiences with Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance
A ‘bit’ of history Some of you might know me as a dedicated MS Exchange junkie. Ever since Microsoft launched version 5.0 of Exchange, I’ve been working with it and I must admit I never found a collaboration suite quite like it. I’ve had numerous…
VMware Visio Stencil for vSphere 4 manuals
While designing and writing administrator guides, I often use pictures instead of words. In my opinion: a picture says more then 1000 words. When VMware vSphere 4 went live I started collecting pictures from Sphere and the Virtual Infrastructure client, I combined them in a…
License Microsoft Windows Server in a VMware environment – Part 2
[This is the 2nd part in the sequel. You can find part 1 here.] We talked about licensing Windows Server on a VMware environment but that’s only one part of the licensing nightmare. You will also need client access licenses also called CALs. Client Access…
No VMGuru.nl in China
Hello folks, Yesterday we noticed a huge increase in the amount of traffic. After some in-depth investigation, we discovered that some ‘friends’ in China found a loophole which quadrupled our traffic within a few hours. Fortunately no real harm was done. Our systems were not compromised. During…
Use Core Server when deploying Windows on a virtual infrastructure?
Since Microsoft introduced Windows 2008 back in 2007, there is the opportunity to install a Core Server. It was the first time Microsoft introduced a lean-and-mean server, where a lot of the Linux and Unix admins always complained that the GUI on a server eats…
Exchange CCR cluster on VMware with iSCSI
A few weeks ago I got an assignment to review a colleague’s infrastructure design based on VMware. The design was fine (because they used my design document as template :-) ) but one thing triggered me. There was a special port group on one of…
New Enterprise Hypervisor comparison
Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup…
How to: Optimize guests for VMware View
We’ ve been doing quite a few VMware View POC’s and the question that colleagues keep asking me is: ‘How do I optimize my Windows guest OS for use with VMware View?’. First of all, I primarily use x86 versions of Windows XP and 7….
Bad network performance on new ESX host
At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a…
Happy birthday founder!
Hello Folks! Today Erik celebrates his 36th birthday. We’re happy to have his party today and we all wish him many happy returns!
How to: Upgrade to vSphere 4.1
With yesterdays release of vSphere 4.1 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. Because I have been testing the beta for a while now, I couldn´t wait to try it in our new testing environment. However, there are a…
VMware vSphere 4.1 released
A few minutes ago VMware has released the new version of VMware vSphere, version 4.1. This new vSphere version contains 150 new features and has improved scalability, memory management, DRS, etc. Besides all the new features the greatest news is that vSphere 4.1…
VMware abandons CPU based licensing model
With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has released a new licensing model. The management products below change from a CPU-based pricing model to one that is VM-based. VMware vCenter CapacityIQ; VMware vCenter AppSpeed; VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager; VMware vCenter Chargeback. Until December 15th…
EqualLogic firmware with vStorage API
This month Dell released their firmware for EqualLogic iSCSI SANs. A couple of things that caught my attention: vStorage API support. Things like snapshot, storage vmotion etc are now handled by the array, instead of the ESX host you can create seperate volume administrators. No…
Problem solved (?)
Update: The problem seems to be solved! We will continue to monitor the web server but it looks like we’re back in business. Since last week we are experiencing problems with the stability of our web server. Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re working hard…