Microsoft Hyper-V Jokes?

Posted on December 3rd, 2008 in Hyper-V, Industry News, Virtualization | 2 Comments »

The comparison between VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V is not new to me or you today.

Frankly speaking, I’m big fans of VMware and I would like to share the related news - Microsoft Hyper-V jokes.

Microsoft to do what VMware does nearly 10 years later - From Mike RTFM

ESX Server beats Hyper-V - DanteDog’s Blog

So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter Part 1 - Gabes Virtual World

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter Part 2 - Gabes Virtual World

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter Part 3 - Gabes Virtual World

Will Microsoft sunset VMware? - 18 months later

Hyper-V with Server Core — Too Dry and Crunchy for our Taste

Hyper-V Server is Finally Here – But What Exactly Is It?

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Revise IT strategy on Economy Crisis

Posted on October 16th, 2008 in Data Center, Industry News, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Economy crisis is already happened and impacted to every business around the world. The major impact are really hit to the banking and financial environment. At the same time, I believe that the financial sector are the highest IT spending every year and everywhere around the world to provide service availability to their customer, stock market, and treasury trading.

If we analyze what happen to the IT spending on the financial and banking environment, you will not surprise to see that the amount of storage, servers, solution and unnecessary equipment been under utilized for every bank around the world. The IT department for financial sector had been comfort live for many years and is time now for them to review and revise their IT spending to ensure higher return from their investment.

Open source or reliable LINUX had not been really high utilize in financial sector are really due to the comfort living of their IT department. Personal point of view, why we have to run something else on the expensive IBM AIX, mainframe, HP UX, Microsoft, Oracle VS the reliable LINUX from x86 or x64 platform to perform the same result? The simple answer is really the mindset from the person.
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Why VMware Regional Office for Asia South not in Malaysia?

Posted on October 9th, 2008 in Industry News | 2 Comments »

VMware had setup their regional Asia South office in Singapore quite some times ago. Personally, I am wondering should this be the correct decision to be based in Singapore which is seems to be a higher cost sustain area, and the IT market in that area are just not focusing enough compare to Malaysia. The reason of saying this, is not because myself is a Malaysian.

1 of the good example, IBM had ship their regional office to Malaysia from Singapore previously, because they saw the potential market grow in this country as well as more talent source in Malaysia for IT related area. Many of the IT giant are setup the IT hub, data center as well as corporate office in Malaysia to enjoy the TAX free holiday as well as cheaper real estate cost and man power resources. There are HP, IBM, DELL, SHELL, EDS, HSBC, Prudential and etc around in Malaysia. Guess what, most of them are even having their production data center in Malaysia itself.

Now we go back to VMware, virtualization is growing in Malaysia, but the present from VMware are more relay on the partner in here. Training are not provided as what been provided in Sinagpore or Australia. Most of the time, even in singapore training center, the attendees are not Singaporean. As economy crisis now, to attend a training in Singapore will be 3 times more expensive for someone who attending a training in Malaysia. If I not mistaken, they have less than 10 employees in malaysia for VMware itself. It just not big enough to attract the confident of the potential giant customer from Malaysia market if you do not present yourself strong enough as your competitor.

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VMware ESX 3.5 Authentication Login Using Active Directory

Posted on August 26th, 2008 in Tips | 3 Comments »

If you look for VMware authentication login using Microsoft Active Directory, I’m sure you can easily found on any seach enginer but most of the documents slightly outdated which is based on VMware ESX 2.x.

The following article try to give better understanding about latest VMware ESX 3.5 authentication login using AD.

Use esxcfg-auth command - VMware ESX Server Network Management Utility

Login to VMware ESX host using SSH as root

Ping ad.malaysiavm.com to make sure you can reach AD server.

The esxcfg‐auth command includes options for configuring interoperability with several authentication providers. This note focuses on the options that are relevant to Active Directory:
esxcfg‐auth [ [ ‐‐enablead | ‐‐disablead ] [ ‐‐addomain= ] [‐‐addc= ]

Type man esxcfg-auth for more information.

–disableab
Reverts the changes required to authenticate the user against Active Directory.

–enablead
Sets up the Console OS to authenticate the user against an Active Directory server. addomain and addc are required with this option.

–addomain
Sets the domain against which the user is to be authenticated when authenticating against an Active Directory server.

–addc
Sets the domain controller against which the user’s password should be checked.

This enables Active Directory based user authentication in the ad.malaysiavm.com domain
with the domain controller dc01.ad.malaysiavm.com.

Basically the system will generate /etc/krb5.conf file as example below:

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Virtualization - Network, Storage, Data Center

Posted on August 23rd, 2008 in Data Center, Virtualization | No Comments »

Virtualization become a MUST for every single environment which run a small, medium or huge Data Center today. Even we can see the grow at the level of small medium business as well as some manufacturing plant too. VMware as the technology and market leader, it had provide a lot of new flexibility in term of reducing carbon foot print, green IT initiative, as well as CAPEX saving and etc. It had been huge saving from every single different perspective. Somehow, it had created complexity in term of Data center, Power & Cooling, Storage, and of course the complexity and extra workload on the engineers who support the environment.

Many of the case study happen today, we do see that users or the implementers had not for see some important hidden potential issue during the earlier stages of deployment. The fast grow of the storage, the higher bandwidth required, specify cooling and power needed to be supplied for the Virtual Infrastructure zone in the data center as well as the operation support task needed to be carried on as daily basis.

A success architect for Virtualization had to been specialize is all those area I had stated above to ensure the entire deployment will able to achieve all the goals had been set during the project planning. Some how, we do need to urge the employers to send the system engineers for further training in multiple products, example like VMware training, Linux administration, Microsoft Training as well as Network Training plus Data center training too. That is all the necessary requirement for the engineer to able to support, manage and plan for future extension of the virtualization farm.
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