Malaysia VMware Communities

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Microsoft Active Directory, I’m sure you can easily found on any seach enginer but most of the documents slightly outdated which is based on VMware ESX 2.x.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

# esxcfg-auth –enablead –addomain=AD.MALAYSIAVM.COM –addc=dc01.ad.malaysiavm.com

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 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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This is an interesting video posted by VMware. Basically, this video is about how Hyper-V Quick Migration breaks network connections.

Personally, I would preferred VMware vMotion.
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Finally, Microsoft had included VMware as their future support road map instead of hold up the customer from moving their server to VMware.

Participating Vendors

The following companies who supply server virtualization software to the marketplace have formally committed to participate in the Server Virtualization Validation Program. Microsoft is working with them to validate their solutions as platforms for Windows Server 2008. Please contact them directly for any additional information.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Citrix Systems, Inc.

Novell, Inc.

Sun Microsystems

Unisys Corp.

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