Malaysia VMware Communities

I was testing VMware Data Recovery and I found something may disclose to security leak.

Basically my VMware Data Recovery configuration are mounted on Linux Samba network share at “\\xx.xx.xx.44\oper” and “\\xx.xx.xx.44\share” as you can see below.

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A virtual network adapter is a program (instead of a physical network adapter) that allows a computer to connect to a network. A virtual network adapter can also be used to connect all the computers on a local area network (LAN) to a larger network such as the Internet or a collection of LANs.

Here, I would like to share how to change virtual machine virtual network adapter manually. In fact, you may know you can add a new virtual adapter and choose the adapter type from drop down menu.

Here you go:
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With my last 3 years of experience, I had seen numbers of companies require significant expansion in the data center to support the business growth, just because of the additional 200 to 2000 servers or storage shelves they need to put in to the data center. With the technology today, it does help us to reduce the space we need to slot in the servers, and storage thanks to the success of virtualization and higher capacity disk drives in the market. To run a full solution of data center with less number of server racks for SME and enterprise, will no longer be a dream due to some facts below,

1. Higher consolidation ratio in virtualization with the latest CPU, memory and servers performance
2. Higher capacity disk drive which significant reduce the number of storage expansion require
3. Virtual I/O which allow the higher utilization of the available bandwidth in data center
4. UCS to provide consolidation and higher capacity of bandwidth to support network and storage utilization in the data center

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Latest news from Cisco which confirm the release of Code Name California by early of March 2009. The solution will provide integration for Data Center Servers, Network Management, Virtualization and Storage Management from 1 console which the vendor believe to simplify the IT management which we had suffer for Years. HP is currently working on the product which provide the same features as Cisco California did. IBM will also soon to join the competition of this product range. With this technology in place, it may change the environment significantly for the next generation data center and my personal point of view is still the cost, features and reliabilities of the products. It will be good for consolidate with acceptable pricing and reliabilities especially at the current economy. Anything that help to save cost will be the top priority to be considered for IT spending.

Personally, I just initiated the prove of concept with the local vendor in our environment regarding the Xsigo Virtual I/O integration into our existing Network, Fiber Channel and ESX 3.5 Virtualization server. I would like to share some of my finding which I think may be useful for reference purpose.

Before the approach on Xsigo, I am actually working on the new design plan to improve the performance and capabilities of the existing virtual infrastructure for the large scale virtualization in our environment. I am actually think about the Cisco director switch on Fiber channel and the network switches of 6509 with 10Gb module, but the cost of doing this, is really going to kill us for the current economy down turn. Suddenly, I been introduce by my buddy with this brand new products which I setup the POC now and I found that is more make sense to look in this product to unlock the under utilize bandwidth in our DC include both Network and Fiber Channel.

Advantages:

1. HCA is cheaper than HBA as we may need 2 HBA per server for redundancy purpose, which only provide 8Gb bandwidth, the HCA will provide 20Gb per HCA, which will be powerful enough for virtualization purpose.
2. HCA will combine both network and fiber channel capabilities, reduce cabling requirement and improve bandwidth utilization.
3. With Vnic and Vhba, we will able to create and utilize existing available bandwidth by reduce the number of FC and Network switches in the Data Center.
4. I will able to reduce the cabling from 18 to 2 HCA connection per ESX in my environment

I am currently stress test the performance on the Xsigo chassis on our ESX, interesting that it will not sacrifice the performance as it able to perform as same as the previous configuration we done. Now, it provide the opportunity for me to utilize the FC ports in my Data Center without increase the number of FC switches, which is currently 95% utilize. Imagine, with 4Gb FC for HBA, except the high performance database server, we will not able to utilize the storage bandwidth on each FC ports. Same time, the gigabit network, will not be consume for more than 10% most of time, will provide more resources for the system which require extra bandwidth in the data center. Xsigo has the intelligent to manage the bandwidth and assign as needed.

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