Some new papers came up while I was out.  DPM, Distributed Switches, and Chargeback.

• VMware Distributed Power Management: Concepts and Usage – DPM has great power savings to use less when the workloads are lower.  I’ve seen customers use it for server workloads but where it really hits home is desktop workloads.  Definately worth a read.
• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch: Migration and Configuration – Distributed switches – Distributed Switches are a huge administrative benefit.  This paper explains how to migrate to distributed switches in your environment.
• VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0 Evaluator’s guide – Chargeback is great for putting fixed and variable costs to your VMs and assigning them back to lines of your business or cost centers.

http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/nextgen.html

The sidebar on the site includes a listing of the upcoming events with links to more information.  Please visit the events page for full details on all of the events (please excuse the formatting of that page, work in progress to clean up the defaults).

Thanks and I look forward to seeing you on the road!

Intel has announced a sweet 8-core Nehelem-EX Xeon and it will be interesting how this will apply to ESX.  As mentioned, I don’t know how ESX will license on it but with the processors hitting the street this quarter , we won’t have to wait long to find out.

I will, of course, post additional information as soon as it becomes publically available.

• We are experiencing issues with the knowledge base
• Verifying isolation mode usage in ThinApp
• Troubleshooting Adding an ESX Server Host to a VMware High Availability Cluster
• Limitations to application support in ThinApp
• Troubleshooting the build process in VMware ThinApp

I was talking to a customer today who thought that Windows licensing in a virtualized world only applied when using Hyper-V and that this licensing did not apply when running VMware’s ESX – not true .  I’m a documentation freak and this post is for my readers to have the links to find information on this topic – which comes up often.

Let’s start with my myth above.  The answer is that Windows licensing when running virtualized applies to any virtualization platform:

Q. Do the virtualization licensing rights of Windows Server 2008 apply when used with non-Microsoft software virtualization technologies?

A.

Yes. The use rights apply regardless of the virtualization product being used.

You can find the complete FAQ here .

The basic idea to quantify running Windows Virtualized is that Standard Edition let’s you run 1 VM on a host, Enterprise gives you 4 VM’s on a host and datacenter gives you unlimited VMs on that host.  Microsoft has a great online calculator to help you understand which licensing method is most cost effective for the number of CPU’s you have and number of VMs you plan on running on each host.  You can find their calculator here .

Lastly, if you have to document everything for management and you want a very detailed paper on their Licensing, or you are battling insomnia at night, have a read at this whitepaper titled: Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual Environments, August 2008

Fast-forward to this past Tuesday, Michael Dell brought up the 80-core chip again .  This time it was suggested we could see that chip as soon as 2010 (btw, I just checked newegg.com and they’re not taking pre-orders yet).  A Central Processing Unit with 80-cores.

That number brings me back to my first PC while still in college: a 386 @ 40MHz (yes for the younger readers, that’s MEGAhertz.)   It had 256KB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk.  Back then, I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a day where a single chip can perform more than a teraflop.  Now there’s one coming soon to a desktop near you.  Intel’s own website shows some great pictures of the chip and compare it to the first computer they used to do a teraflop in 1996, a computer of 10,000 Pentium Pro’s @ 200 MHz using 500kW of power and an additional 500kW of power for cooling.  In contrast, the 80-core chip performs 1.01 teraflops with just 62 watts of power.  Amazing.

So why do I mention this on my blog?  I often ask customers today who have never used virtualization (yes, they still exist), what applications in your environment use all 8 cores on a dual-socket quad core box?  Occasionally I’ll get a response about their Oracle or Exchange implementation.  I mention how the 6-core Dunningtons are out today and the 8-core Nehalem’s are not far from now.  When your running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that hardware?  Virtualization is the only one.  AMD and Intel’s "arms race" of processors has left the average software application in the dust.  Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push the CPU capacity in the datacenter.  One of the few remaining ways to utilize these types of processors is virtualization.  If you have not virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it.  Remember that the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5 years.  Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the 80-core powerhouses in it.  Then you will be able to migrate all of your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside them.

I remember that 386 I purchased for $2,000 in 1991.  That was a mere 17 years ago.  I’ll be retiring in about 25 years or so.  I wonder what we’ll be running on then?

Read the full list of winners here .

• There’s a good article over at VM/ETC about why ESXi is a 241MB download if it’s only 32MB of a hypervisor.
• There’s a couple great articles over at vmwarewolf.com on Common Licensing Issues , Common Networking Issues , and Common System Management Issues .
• IT Knowledge Exchange has a great article on configuring the Virtual Infrastructure Client to use single signon .
• I have to link at least one article from Mike D. This week it’s on a great demo of Distributed Power Management

Have a great weekend.