It’s been a busy 3 days, after 3 panels (one on what VMware/Cisco/EMC are doing for service providers, one for customers, and an open panel (VMware, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, Emerson, APC, NetApp and Panduit)– which was a gas around the “Next Gen Datacenter”. I got to poke the Oracle guy (in a nice friendly respectful way) around their VMware support policy.
Great team effort to support the event – both before and at the show itself. On top of the overall show team, there are a few folks worth calling out for a pat on the back:
1) Martin Glynn – pulled out the stops to provide overwhelming equipment for the show. In the Datacenter of the Future area, there were all the things that EMC does, including two V-Max arrays. We had the same in our booth, and also in the Intel booth. It was literally TONS of gear – and was everywhere. Martin – you were a big part of getting a lot of V-Max in front of a lot of people for real hands on.
2) Hariharan (Hari) Harikannan – was the man behind huge chunks of the VCE demo in Padmesree Warrior’s day 2 keynote. You wouldn’t believe the last minute gyrations and effort if I spelt them all out here, but anyone who has supported an event knows how that goes down :-)
If you’re interested to get a feel of the event, see what was on the expo floor, and the demo from the day 2 technical keynote – at least from one person’s perspective, read on!
A busy 3 days indeed….
Was cool to have John Chambers come by the EMC booth. I’m not sure if he remembers this, but our paths have crossed many times. I met him for the first time in 1999, when I was the point guy on the first carrier deployment of GSR 12000s and MPLS. In fact, who is kidding who - I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember :-)
I don’t hold it against him – he’s done a great job leading a great company, and has extended/reinvented the company several times on his watch – an amazing feat. This is him seeing the demo from the man who made big chunks of it, Hari. It was awesome to execute on this in Santa Clara with the VMware and Cisco teams – we have all the gear, technology and people all here in one place.
We did all sorts of online stuff – was great to meet James, HoHo and Omar in person...
Padmesree’s keynote today was great – and was great to see the demo we worked on together in Santa Clara was leveraged.
You can download this capture in high rez here (working to get it up to Blip, but will take a bit), and see Padme’s full keynote on the official event site here)
Before the event, I took a short part of the demo (mass provisioning using VMware, Cisco and EMC “template/profile oriented techniques”) and recorded a similar walkthrough, and you can see it here:
You can download a high-rez version here.
For a “sense” of the show floor, here are two quick walkthroughs of the expo – I LOVED VMware’s little “Private Cloud” cloud stickers on the floor. And YES, that is massive EMC presence in the Datacenter of the Future area, and a good crowd (when I shot these, it was late in the day – so good to be busy in spite of it being AFTER the last session of the day!) in the EMC booth.
This second one has some of the other fun stuff I saw ;-) I love my Rock Band – and my wife is a killer fake drummer :-)
Was also great to hang out with my team and chilling out a bit too….
There were a few things we could have done better. We had a similar structure to the event as we did for VMworld and EMC world – very focused on VMware, very focused on enterprise apps running on virtualized infrastructure models, and the best practices, tools and integration around storage, backup, and DR.
But, at this event, the most EMC popular booth stations and demos were the EMC resouce management and RSA ones. We were demonstrating:
One thing that gets hard as one’s capabilities broaden out is that you need to be different things to different people, and different audiences. At a show dominated by networking folks, they are FAR more interested in what EMC does on the above – which are squarely things they are thinking about. Heck they were so interested in those things, it was even more than things that are “semi-close” to their domain like FCoE discussions.
It made me realize – next time, need to make those more front and center (and at VMworld too – not to the same degree, but VMware folks straddle a couple worlds).
A little cooked tonight, and looking forward to a week back in the lab – have some really, really solid technical treats for the faithful!
This morning I wake up to find an e-mail from the VMware Certification department, inviting me to take the VCP4 Beta Exam. This is pretty exciting, yet it disappoints me because it reminds me that I still have not received my VCDX Design Exam Beta results (going on 3 months now). However, I did talk to Tina at VMware on Tuesday and she sounded hopeful that these results will be available sometime in July.
It looks like the General Release exam will become available in August, based on the information provided in the e-mail from VMware;
Dear Rick,
VMware is proud to announce the availability of the VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 (VCP4) beta exam! We would like to invite you to participate in this beta. Your experience as a current VCP3 and vSphere beta product user will be valuable in helping us craft a high quality exam.
Detailed registration instructions are at the bottom of this email. First, please be sure to review the following important information.
1.) All content, items, displays and materials are the copyrighted intellectual property of VMware, Inc. To maintain and protect the value of the VMware Certified Professional program do NOT disclose the content to anyone.
2.) You will be required to respond to each item presented. You will not be able to return to items once you have completed them. You will also be able to provide constructive comments on each item and exhibit.
3.) You will not receive a score at the end of the beta exam. A score will be sent to you 6 to 8 weeks after you complete the exam. The purpose of a beta is to verify the validity and reliability of the items statistically. Not all items will survive post beta.
4.) If you successfully pass the exam and are currently a VCP3 in good standing, you will be awarded the VCP4 certification. If you do not pass the exam you may take the exam again when the new exam is available in August.
5.) There will be 240 minutes to complete the exam.
6.) The exam is available for registration by voucher only. The voucher will also be good for 70% off the regular exam price. Your voucher is provided below.
7.) Vouchers are good for one use and are not transferable.
8.) The beta exam will be available until July 17th, 2009.
9.) Questions can be sent to certification@vmware.com
10.) You may only take the beta exam ONE time. All violators will be ineligible for certification.
Well, that’s it. I will be registering sometime today and I will report back to you on how the exam looks. Wish me luck!
Author’s Note: This content was first published over at Storage Monkeys, but it appears that it has since disappeared and is no longer available. For that reason, I’m republishing it here (with minor edits). Where applicable, I’ll also be republishing other old content from that site in the coming weeks. Thanks!
In this article, I’m going to tackle what will probably be a sensitive topic for some readers: VMware over NFS. All across the Internet, I run into article after article after article that sings the praises of NFS for VMware. Consider some of the following examples:
That first link looks to be mostly a reprint of this blog post by Nick Triantos. Now, Nick is a solid storage engineer; there is no question in my mind that he knows Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS inside out. Nick is certainly someone who is more than qualified to speak to the validity of using NFS for VMware storage. But…
I am going to have to disagree with some of the statements that are being propagated about NFS for VMware storage. Is NFS for VMware environments a valid choice? Yes, absolutely. However, there are some myths about NFS for VMware storage that need to be addressed.
Now, one might look at this article and say, “Scott, you hate NFS!” No, actually, I like using NFS for VMware Infrastructure implementations, and here’s why:
So there are some tangible benefits to using NFS for VMware Infrastructure. But let’s be real about this, and not try to gloss over technical details. While NFS has some real advantages, it also has some real disadvantages, and organizations choosing a storage protocol need to understand both sides of the coin.
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
Republished: Dispelling Some VMware over NFS Myths
Similar Posts:Scott Lowe recently wrote a good post on FCoE, and his thoughts here. The comments of his readers are comments I’ve heard from others as well, so I posted a response in the comments, but I think Scott and I don’t have the same readership (and perhaps those that do may not read the comments)
This is an important dialog, IMHO, and I thought the my response was worth posting, as I’ve gotten loads of questions like this also.
If you’re interested in this thread – suggest reading Scott’s posts and the comments. If you want to see my take, read on….
(from my comment on Scott’s blog post)
Guys The “multi-hop” thing is a bit old news - I did a big post on this when the FCoE spec was done (June 3rd)
http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/06/fcoe-ratified.html
This covers it in gory detail.
The specific issue is that “pre standard” initiators and targets were missing something called FIP (FCoE initialization protocol). The gen 1 HBAs from Qlogic and Emulex were really more for early interop, plugfests, and development, and I believe (I know this for a fact for the Qlogic 8000 series - and I would fully expect the same from Emulex) are not software upgradable to the FC-BB-5 standard that includes FIP.
BTW - we caught flack at EMC for not natively supporting FCoE earlier on the array targets, but this was why - the standard simply wasn’t ready. It was ready for host-FCoE switch-FC switch-FC target. Now, it’s getting ready for array targets. Personally, that’s why I disagreed with the approach of taking the QLE8000 series card (with custom pre-FIP standard elements), putting into a FAS head, and calling that a solution. While that was going on (and making marketing noise - but frankly a move that doesn’t help the customer, because now they have a FAS head that needs a heavy hardware maintenance window to do a PCIe card upgrade), we were busy doing interop and working on the standard at the standard body (look at the meeting minutes - they are all public).
We’re now, of course, developing an ultraflex IO module for FCoE, which are hot-swappable.
But back to the larger question - why FCoE? People who know me, I’m a SUPER fan of NAS and iSCSI, and naturally am biased in that direction, but as I’ve worked with more and more customers, I have a growing understanding of the why.
NFS is great and iSCSI are great, but there’s no getting away from the fact that they depend on TCP retransmission mechanics (and in the case of NFS, potentially even higher in the protocol stack if you use it over UDP - though this is not supported in VMware environments today). because of the intrinsic model of the protocol stack, the higher you go, the longer the latencies in various operations. One example (and it’s only one) - this means always seconds, and normally many tens of seconds for state/loss of connection (assuming that the target fails over instantly, which is not the case of most NAS devices). Doing it in shorter timeframes would be BAD, as in this case the target is an IP, and for an IP address to be non-reachable for seconds - is NORMAL.
There’s also the question of the fact that anything dependent on TCP/IP also will have scenarioes that depend on ARPs, which can take time.
This isn’t a secret. Look at the Netapp TR-3428 (and upcoming TR-3749) and EMC H6337 docs which spell the timeouts for NFS datastores on FAS and Celerra platforms respectively - which are in many tens of seconds (refer to the latest – currently it adds up to 125 seconds), and for iSCSI – if you read the VMware guides, the recommendation is 60 seconds.
FCoE expects most transmission loss handling to be done at the Ethernet layer, via 802.1Qbb (STILL NOT A STANDARD!) for lossless congestion handling and legacy CRC mechanisms for line errors. This means milliseconds - and in fact in many cases microseconds of link state sensitivity.
Also, whereas we are seeing 30x performance increases for solid state disk on devices without filesystems, we see 4-6x in cases where they support a filesystem. That doesn’t mean filesystems (or NAS devices are bad), but highlights that one answer isn’t the answer all the time, for all workloads, all SLAs, and all use cases.
These ARE NOT showstoppers for many, many (most?) applications, and many, many use cases, but they are for some - and often, those are for applications with hyper-stringent SLAs - but we want to virtualize everything, ever application possible, right?
All FCoE adapters and switches can also be used for iSCSI and NAS, so don’t think of it as an either/or, but an “and”. It means that it is possible to whittle the use cases that can’t use an ethernet storage transport to near zero (it’s not zero, because there will always be mainframes and whatnot). The ultimate point on this (”this” being the point that it’s not an FC “HBA”, but rather a “NIC feature”) is that Intel has commited to supporting the final result of 802.1Qbb and then doing a software initiator - at that point, FCoE support will just be an attribute of every commodity NIC and switch on the market. Everyone in the FC HBA/switch market is rushing to it not because they want proprietary, but rather because were reaching the inflection point where if you’re not doing this, you’re going to be out of business (maybe not today, but at a relatively near “tomorrow”).
The FCoE idea important (again as a “NIC/switch feature”, because it means that convergence (wire once, use for LAN/NAS/iSCSI/FCoE) is then applicable to a broader market, which only accelerates the broader use of ethernet storage, which many people (me included) want to see come sooner rather than later.
There’s a far lesser IT value proposition of maintaining and integrating with exisitng tools and processes. I only say lesser because frankly, if there’s a better way, it can over time change a process.
Remember - this is coming from someone who:
a) loves NAS
b) loves iSCSI (came from iSCSI startup)
c) works for a storage company that is in the NAS, iSCSI, FC, and FCoE (and heck, COS and CAS as well) business - we just do what our customers tell us they need.
At least in my personal experience, our customers are asking for FCoE for those reasons.
We’re doing these webcasts with the product folks on vSphere and EMC topics – a great opportunity to see/learn/ask/give feedback.
Every thursday – 11am EST.
Are there topics YOU want to see, demos you want to experience, or people you want to hear from? Post them!
Chris – you did a GREAT job on this video, man – I was laughing out loud!
This is another one of my “thinking out loud” posts. This time, the question I’m mulling is this one: why deploy FCoE?
I haven’t hid the fact that I’m not really a fan of FCoE (see here or here), but I was starting to warm to the technology and thought that I was beginning to see some benefits to deploying FCoE. Namely, the fact that FCoE is inherently very compatible with “traditional” FCP, allowing organizations to leverage their existing FCP installation while transitioning to FCoE. Some hands-on time I’d recently spent with a Cisco Nexus 5000 switch showed me just how closely aligned the two technologies are and how (relatively) easy it was to extend an FC fabric using FCoE. OK, I think I get this.
Then, a few days ago, I read this article on FCoE divergence. Given that The Register can sometimes be quite sensationalist (and that’s putting it mildly), I contacted a colleague of mine whose input and knowledge I trust. He informed me that FCoE was currently limited in that FCoE is not multi-hop enabled—meaning, you can’t connect FCoE initiators on one switch to FCoE targets on another switch. (Apparently, this shortcoming is due to be corrected shortly.)
Whoa! That’s a limitation of which I was not aware. And with that limitation in mind, knowing that FCoE will—for the time being at least—be limited to convergence at the edge, I have to ask: why deploy FCoE at all? What real and specific benefits does an organization seek to gain by deploying FCoE as opposed to just deploying FC? Is the edge convergence really that worthwhile and valuable?
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
Thinking Out Loud: Why Deploy FCoE?
Similar Posts:I was going through my list of actions in OmniFocus, looking at my projects and actions and evaluating each of them. In my “Potential Posts” project, where I keep links to articles that I might use in a blog post, I found the URL for this article by Steve Kaplan about virtualization, Cisco Nexus, and blade servers. The basic idea of his article is that virtualization and the Cisco Nexus—specifically, the unified fabric—are going to combine to kill blade servers.
I do agree with Steve that there is no innate relationship that means running VMware on blades is somehow “automagically” better:
It is amazing how frequently we hear IT managers talk about deploying blade servers as an integral component of their new virtual infrastructures - as if there were an obvious synergy between VMware and blade server architectures.
Absolutely! Blades are an option, just like rack mounted servers, and it’s up to the customer to choose (or us as consultants to recommend) the form factor that best meets the business needs. It might be blade servers, or it might be rack mounted servers. It just depends. So, on this one point, I agree with Steve.
Yet, at the same time, I also disagree with this point that Steve makes in his article:
Blade servers have always been an impediment to an optimal virtual infrastructure because they introduce limitations in efficiently utilizing power and cooling resources, budget, flexibility, manageability, bios and firmware updates, performance and troubleshooting.
Here is where Steve and I start to disagree. In fact, this specific article was something of the catalyst for a series of posts, written by colleague and friend Aaron Delp, detailing how blade servers and virtualization work well together:
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part One, HP Power Sizing
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Two, IBM Power Sizing
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Three, IBM Traditional Expansion Options
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Four, HP Traditional Expansion Options
While this series of articles doesn’t squarely address all of the arguments against blades and virtualization, the series does make it clear that blades can produce power savings vs. rack mounted servers, and that blades do offer enough expansion options to accommodate the majority of virtualization deployments.
I also disagree with Steve about the value of the unified fabric, especially considering that right now unified fabric can exist only at the edge of the network and not at the core. That being the case, I find it hard to say that unified fabric is going to kill blade servers. So, again, I have to disagree with Steve’s position.
However, Steve’s not entirely wrong—virtualization, FCoE and 10Gb Ethernet, and yes even unified fabric will change how blade servers are designed and deployed. Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is one example of how blade servers are going to adapt to these agents of change, and I believe we’ll see more examples from other leading vendors in the coming months and years. But will blades die away entirely? No, I don’t think so.
Think I’m crazy? Think I’m out of my mind? Feel free to speak up in the comments—courteous comments are always welcome.
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
Blades Won’t Die, But They Will Change
Similar Posts:Reader Kyle Ross shared with me a potential issue with VMware’s new backup product, VMware Data Recovery. Others within the VMware blogging scene have also covered this, but I wanted to mention it as well so that others didn’t run into the problem. Here’s Kyle’s write-up:
I was made aware of a serious (in my opinion) bug with VDR during a call with VMware support that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere. This is an internally known issue that causes snapshots to build up on VM’s that are members of VDR backup jobs.
During the backup process a new snapshot is created and VDR updates the snapshot descriptor file (vm_name-000001.vmdk) to mark the snapshot as un-removable. The bug is introduced when the backup process completes, it fails to mark the snapshot as removable causing them to remain.
The tricky part of the problem is that the snapshots are not visible through the vSphere Client, nor are they listed in apps like ‘RVTools’ that use the VMware CLI to gather data. They could potentially be listed in the new datastore views but I didn’t think to look there before I resolved it in my environment. I ran across them by logging into the service console and running the following command to list all the delta files on the datastores attached to the server.
find /vmfs/volumes/ -name \*delta\*
In my environment I noticed numerous VM’s with multi-gigabyte delta files that I couldn’t account for via snapshots listed in the GUI. Here is the solution I was given by VMware. Via the service console, browse to the location of the VMDK files for the affected VM. Run this command to identify the descriptors that need to be corrected, replacing ‘virtual_machine_name’ with the actual name of the VM.
grep –I ddb.dele *virtual_machine_name*-000???.vmdk
This command will quickly identify the delta files that are marked as non-deletable. The workaround is to edit the affected VMDK descriptor files and change “ddb.deletable” from “false” to “true”. You will probably also need to edit the root VMDK file and change this field as well, otherwise you may be left with one open snapshot. Note that due to a change in how ESX 4 performs file locking, you will probably need to SSH into the host that is currently running the VM to edit these files. Once you have edited all the files, create a new snapshot for the VM either via the GUI or command line. Then issue the “Delete All” snapshots command to force ESX to combine all the files and close all the visible and hidden snapshots.
As soon as more information is available, I’ll post it here. If any other readers have more information to share, please speak up in the comments.
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
Snapshot Issue with VMware Data Recovery
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Existing Virtual PC 2007 users who start using Windows Virtual PC may be startled by the lack of an obvious “Virtual Hard Disk wizard”. But do not fear, the virtual hard disk wizard is still there – it is just hidden. Or more accurately – it has been placed into more appropriate workflows.
The first place where the virtual hard disk wizard appears is when you are creating a new virtual machine. If you select to Create a virtual hard disk using advanced options in the new virtual machine wizard you will seamlessly transition into the new virtual hard disk wizard:
The second place where the virtual hard disk wizard appears is from the virtual hard disk settings page, if you click on the Create… button:
Now, you may be wondering what to do if you want to create a virtual hard disk that is not associated with a virtual machine? The answer is that you do not use Windows Virtual PC! With Windows 7 virtual hard disk management is now part of the core operating system. You can create virtual hard disks using either Disk Management or DiskPart:
Cheers,
Ben
The team in Santa Clara pumped this one out furiously over the last little while – it’s got great content.
Here are a couple of highlights:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/App_Networking/vdiucswp.html
More to come, we’re starting on new stuff coming from VMware, adding EFDs into the mix, and more.
Thanks to Dugie for bringing this to my attention. We have just published a document that outlines approaches and best practices for running Windows Essential Business Server in a virtual machine. You can grab it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=933b2eb6-f3bb-47c1-a227-13bb2ccc0a94
Here is the abstract from the document:
This document provides guidance for virtualizing Windows® Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008 by using the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ technology. Server virtualization allows you to install Windows EBS software on a single physical server reducing hardware, energy, and management costs. Virtualizing Windows EBS consists of the following steps:
- Choose a virtualization configuration
- Install and enable Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
- Create and configure the virtual machines for Windows EBS
- Install Windows EBS on the virtual machines
This document covers virtualizing Windows EBS Standard
Cheers,
Ben
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I am going to walk you through setting up open filer 2.3, ( after a openfiler 2.3 64 bit, install with Static IP. * note, do not use openfiler VM ) to work with vSphere’s latest VMware tools, and VMXNET3, Paravirutal SCSI adapters.
Why write this? the openfiler 2.3 kernel is build with open VMware tools installed, which do not support the above, and we will need to remove these to get them working.
When I refer to console, I am talking about Linux console, not VMware’s.
You are set, you can now use the IP of the VMXNET3 nic for your NFS or ISCSI, and the other static ip for management.
You should also see the vmdk under block devices in openfiler UI in the volumes section.
Roger L.
You know, it’s really irritating when you pour your heart and soul into something, only to find someone else riding your coattails and leeching off your efforts. It would appear that NetworkVirtualization.com is one such leech.
I have no problem with other sites syndicating my content as long as proper attribution of the original author and original site is provided. Do me a favor: visit some of the URLs below (I’m not going to hyperlink them and give the site a traffic boost) and tell me how any of the examples I’ve listed below provide proper attribution of the original author and the original site:
http://networkvirtualization.com/content/unified-fabric-inevitability
http://networkvirtualization.com/content/vmware-io-queues-micro-bursting-and-multipathing
http://networkvirtualization.com/content/tap-vsphere-pvscsi-performance-separate-vm-boot-and-data-drives
Let’s see…content from my site, Chad Sakac’s site, and Rich Brambley’s site, all syndicated on their site without any clear attribution back to the original post—except for a very small link near the bottom of the article. If you hadn’t been looking for that link, or if I hadn’t told you that the articles above were written by me, Chad, and Rich, respectively, would you have known? And those are just the authors I recognized! How many more are there that I don’t recognize?
To whomever is running NetworkVirtualization.com: if you are going to syndicate content, you need to provide proper attribution. Otherwise, taking someone else’s content and allowing people to believe that it’s yours is called plagiarism, and it’s wrong.
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
I Love Having My Content Stolen
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We’re running a webcast series for the slightly more laid back summer months, in run up to the full extravaganza that will be VMworld.
Join us every Thursday at 11am ET for a new EMC Solutions for VMware webcast.
To view all EMC Solutions for VMware webcasts:
First few up to bat:
Jul 02, 09
Backup and Recovery for VMware Infrastructure – Driving Costs Out of Your Virtual Environment (how do you backup more, for less $, faster – and recover files in VMs, VMs, and sites?)
Jul 09, 09
EMC and VMware—Building Your Internal Cloud (this is focused on management tools for VMware environments)
Jul 15, 09
Maximize the Benefits of Virtualization with Optimized VMware Backup (how do you tweak your backup strategy in VMware environments)
Jul 23, 09
Complete Disaster Recovery with EMC and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
(Deploying Site Recovery Manager, configuring, using, and automating failback)
I’m a couple days behind on this, been extremely busy at work getting ready to go live with our SAP Deployment on July 2nd. Anyways, enough crying to you about my busy schedule. Nava Davuluri wanted me to help get the word out about the new VMware Sample Code website (titled Code Central).
This will be a site dedicated to the developer community, sample codes related to products such as the new vSphere CLI, vCLI, Perl Toolkit, Java Webservices SDK and much much more. Check out the site today for great code from other bloggers such as Eric Sloof and Alan Renouf!
Also be sure to check out the Code Central Blog!
We have spent a lot of time telling people how Windows Virtual PC and Virtual XP mode will allow them to run incompatible legacy applications on Windows 7. Unfortunately a number of people have come away with the impression that you can only do this with Virtual XP mode and that you can only run a single application at a time.
This is simply not true.
Using Windows Virtual PC you can access seamless applications from Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines. You can have multiple applications running seamlessly in a single virtual machine, and you can have seamless applications running under different virtual machines at the same time.
If you look at this screenshot:
You can see that I have Internet Explorer and a command prompt running under the same (Windows XP) virtual machine. I then have Windows Live Photo Gallery running under a separate (Windows 7) virtual machine. All three of these applications have been launched directly from my start menu in Windows 7.
Cheers,
Ben
A big issue for companies making the upgrade to vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus from their existing VI3 Enterprise License wasn’t the low $295 price per CPU (VMware Part VS4-ENT-ENT-PL-UG-PROMO), it was the hassle of having to renew their SnS Entitlement! What if your company just renewed their 1 Year Enterprise SnS? You’d basically need to purchase another 1 Year Enterprise Plus SnS. Even though it would push out your support another year, this additional cost could be quite high for some companies, especially if you have dozens or even hundreds of hosts!
Customers complained and VMware Listened…
VMware will be releasing a 2 Month Enterprise Plus SnS package for customers in this exact boat. The price will be reasonably priced at $140 per CPU for Platinum and $120 per CPU for Gold (both estimated retail). Well thank you VMware! IMHO the best thing you could have done was just given all your Enterprise customers a free upgrade to Enterprise Plus, but I suppose this is the 2nd best thing I could ask for….seeing that I’m upgrading about 20 licenses in the next week.
For more information on the Enterprise to Enterprise Plus upgrade promotion, please contact your local VMware Retailer! There is also an upgrade promotion that includes the Nexus 1000V Virtual Switch (VMware Part VS4-N1K-UG