The VMguy

Some good ones came out last week.  Let’s take a look:

• VMware vSphere 4: Exchange Server on NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel – a very nice paper on how NFS, iSCSI, and Fiber Channel performed running a very large number of mailboxes on Exchange.
• Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0 – Absolutely a must-read for new administrators and a new addition for my Admin Bookmarks page .  This is also a great review for those looking to upgrade to vSphere.
• Using Local Disks in VMware View Deployment – A very interesting idea: in a remote office running local ESX servers, use a Storage Appliance to gain HA with local disks only for desktops running in View.
• VMware Fault Tolerance Recommendations and Considerations on VMware vSphere 4 – The defacto-standard read if you are planning to use FT in your enviornment.  This article is a keeper of all of the current ins-and-outs of FT.
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Virtual Networking – a great reference for all of the new capabilities in networking in 4.0.  Very detailed and technical.
• What Is New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage – The complete list of everything that’s new from a storage perspective.  From thin-provisioning to Pluggable Storage Architecture, it’s all there.

A couple new technical papers got posted this week.  Some good reading for the IT staffers working hard this summer.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Performance on VMware vSphere^TM 4 <-Great reading for seeing how Exchange performs on ESX4.

Smart Card and Certificate Authentication in VMware View  <-If you need to use smart cards with VMware View this a must read

Repurposing a PC to a Thin Desktop Using VMware View <-a very common question from customers that want to extend the life of their PC a little longer.  Good reading on a few ideas on how to do so.

Network Segmentation in Virtualized Environments  <-Some good ideas if you need to seperate and firewall off sections of your infrastructure.

I’m going to close the VMware upcoming features poll on the right on Feb 1.  I must admit, I’m suprised at the results a little.   Keep the votes coming before it closes.   I’ll post the final results on Feburary 1st along with what I expected the top three to be.

Customers often ask me about other options to monitor for network link failures outside of the standard link monitoring.  For instance, what’s a better way to monitor for network port failures if the whole link does not fail?  Shudong Zhou from VMware wrote a good article on using Beaconing and how ESX decides which NIC has failed.   Beaconing really shines when you have 3 or more NIC adapters teamed together but you can use it with two NICs as well.  You can read the article in it’s entirety here .