Want to play truth or dare with the Oracle Sales force? (Updated)
If you want to play truth or dare with the Oracle Sales Force now seems the time again! Back in Juli 2009 I had the first collisions with the Oracle Sales force about licensing Oracle on top of VMware environments. Instead of trying to help…
Updated: Supported Business Applications on the VMware Platform
More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5.5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website…
How to calculate electrical costs for cooling and power consumption
For putting together a business case costs and revenues are an important part of it. If you want to calculate the direct resource costs associate with hosting a server in your data center, you want to know the direct power consumption by the server in…
vSphere Licensing and Options Overview
Last week we got a question concerning the licensing options around vSphere and how to choose the correct edition and options from all the flavors and options offered by VMware. So while answering the questions concerning the licensing I thought back to a nice overview…
The VMware Infrastructure 3 Support Life Cycle
If you haven’t upgraded to VMware vSphere 4 by now, you should consider it and rethink your strategy. VMware has removed all but the most recent versions of their Virtual Infrastructure product binaries from their download page on June 17th. As of May 2010, the…
Consolidation ratios. Picture vs thousand words…
When we are selling, designing and/or building a virtual infrastructure, we brag about consolidation ratios we can accomplish. But what’s a consolidation ratio of 8 to 1 or 10 to 1? In this case a picture says more than a thousand words …….. On the…
License Microsoft Windows Server in a VMware environment – Part 1
Last week I had another nice discussion around the 90 day assignment rule for Windows Server licensing on a VMware environment. To answer this shortly: You may move running instances between licensed servers without acquiring additional licenses. However you cannot exceed the maximum number of…
Project VRC: Clock drift and test results
Project Virtual Reality Check finally posted a new document about previous results and possible clock drift when using the “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)”. Previous test setups and results didn’t take into account how different hypervisors handle passing time. In my opinion this is a…
Getting your money back
To get a new project funded is often hard work. You have to calculate how much it costs to build your virtual infrastructure and how fast you can save money so you can justify the investment. Even after you started the project and you are…
Red Hat subscriptions on a VMware infrastructure
The world of licenses and subscription models is a complex whole, by adding a virtual component it even got more complex. Virtual machines aren’t bound to one physical server and can move freely across several physical servers or even in and out of a cloud….
Determining VMware Software Version and Build Number
I am just writing an observation report about a virtual infrastructure based upon VMware ESX and was wondering which version the customer is running Virtual Center at the moment. After asking my vExpert colleagues 8-) they pointed me to the help menu and the about…
Software Vendors with Support Policies for Customers Running in VMware Environments
I get more and more the question does vendor x with application y support their software running in a VMware environment. There are several questions to ask: Can the application be virtualized? or in other words does the application run without problems in a VMware…