what if the license server go down, will all the existing connections or sessions been terminated automatically?

He had explained as the configuration in the license server and license files are design to prevent the point of failure in the scenario of license server unavailable due to any failures. You will be given 28 days period of time with unlimited seats in the event of license servers unavailable during the outage.

In normal scenario, assume your license server is functioning with 1000 seats, you will also allow to provision 10% extra within 28 days before you increase the purchased licenses. This will allow you to turn on extra capacity temporally in the short period.

Related posts:

1. New license offer from VMware vSphere 5 on 3rd party VDI solution

Virtualization had become matured and well adopted by most environment today. The next wave no longer focusing IaaS, but the focus will be more on User Experience such as VDI, Application virtualization, SaaS, PaaS and etc. Matured users will start to look into applications & data availability.Virtual Machine HA fail over are not good enough to provide higher availability.

Virtual Machine could be fail over during hardware failure, how about services failure or the application client server dependency issues? Example : There may be the application or middle ware machine require manual restart during a HA kick in scenario.

These challenges are always there and require a better solution to overcome it. The next wave of virtualization, should be more focus on application availability, which the major vendor will try to enable the application aware capability, to ensure the application stack available after any fail over situation happen.

Amazon went down become a big news to all of us, as they are the public cloud leader globally and the failure had alerted all of us to re-look into the definition of cloud again. Everyone have a different view about cloud, but fundamental, AVAILABILITY is a MUST for all of us. Moving forward, Users will be more careful to evaluate the cloud offering SLA, Term and condition or even challenge about the Recovery and DR plan the cloud provider will be provided. What happen to Amazon had been disaster to many users. Famous site as CYDIA had also impacted, million of users could not access or experience slow connection during the outage. This had alerted some users to reconsider about their cloud strategy, whether to build private or go public.

This had created major challenges to all the public cloud provider to prevent the similar situation happened on them in the future. Provider need to include more services to prevent the situation, subscribers will also request more to ensure this do not happen to them once they move to cloud in the future.

Will you go for public or private cloud in the future? My take is Hybrid. How about you?

Related posts:

1. Security Consideration with Cloud Computing
2. Arista Network for Virtualization vEOS vs Cisco Nexus 1000V
3. Intel Xeon E7 New Tech line Refresh bring 10 Cores and 20 Threads per CPU

This is a good news for most of the ERP users especially when you have SAP running in your production environment.

(see SAP Note 1173954 for details):
1. Since Jan 13, 2009, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Read the full details from the official announcement.

You can read more about the article from here and watch the nice video too.

Have fun.

If you’re looking at technical point of view, personally I think VMware competitor is few year behind VMware vSphere. Check out more detail about VMware vSphere 4 Cheat Sheet posted by Jason Boche.

Referring to costing, I don’t agreed with what Citrix presented during the event this morning. You’re always try to tell customer pay if you need it. What are you talking about? Are you trying to tell Enterprise customers don’t use HA or don’t use those features provided? How about Microsoft Hyper-V cost comparison?

Again, I would said I’m not sure how true chart show as above and the most important is apple to apple comparison.

In fact, there are many many kind of comparison between VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen. Please feel free to contact us, we’re willing to share with you!

VMware Server 2.0 is free and open source version, which is different with enterprise ESX 3i which also a free version from VMware. In term to utilize VMware server 2.0, you will require to have a Windows or Linux install on your machine or server, and install VMware Server 2.0 on top of the operating system to enable the hypervisor to be executed. This is different with ESX 3i which is not require any Operating System to be installed.

We may see this as a competitive product with VMware Workstation 6.5 which recently launched. If you ask my opinion, I will say that both are on different product range. VMware Server 2 can be consider as alternative to the business users, who may not need the advance technology & features to simplify their IT environment with minimal administration require. This product is more suitable for the Small Medium Enterprise users which may not have a Data Center for their working location. I will say that a Junior IT professional will easily able to manage the VMware Server and take the opportunity as a entry level for Enterprise Virtualization with VMware Server 2. Besides that, it does provide opportunity for every users to have virtualization in place for their business to provide better ROI in term of hardware investment and utilization.

If we look VMware Workstation, it provide more features and ability to the IT pro users to perform their test and development environment on their laptop, workstation or desktop which reduce the amount of servers require for a corporate to perform their application development. Somehow, ESX is targeting Enterprise level, 3i is provide for free which some cases we may not require VMotion and HA capability. Management wise, Workstation is simple and easy. You may not require to browse through the web console and easily can be launched as a program from your machine, but you will lost the administration features on the network. VMware Workstation has ACE integrated, drag and drop features and etc, which may not require for most of the VMware Server users for hosting purpose. VMware Server 2 will require a web browser for your management, and you able to manage it through LAN network. There is a tomcat installed while you configure you VMware server at the 1st time.

In VMware Server 2, I had seen there are a lot of new features and improvement and I am impress with the respond time of the web browser. There is absolutely no delay within the respond over the web browser which is easy to be used and managed. It contain most features we require and useable today and improvement of performance and manage ability. Again, this is a free version, as if I compare this to the free version of hypervisor from XEN, I will prefer to proceed with VMware Server 2.

I did a quick test and I would like to share my personal review about Citrix XenServer 5.0:

Personally I think network speed is fast compare to VMware ESX. I have a physical 1Gbps NIC network speed and I can get 2Gbps network speed after install XenTools on Windows 2008 server but require 2 times reboot(SuSE Linux require 1 reboot). Anyway VM guest shutdown and reboot process is faster than VMware ESX.

I was try to install SuSE Linux 10 using 4 ISO CD (both NFS or CIFS), the Citrix XenServer always give me an error “The VM rejected the attempt to detach the device xxxxx refusing to close” when switch ISO CD1 to ISO CD2. You have to extract 4 ISO CD into one single location to make it work or copy ISO to local storage(provider you have enough local disk space).

The enterprise product should not have similar issue and this is not make sense at all.

Anyway, you can try alternative way using “Install URL” instead of using ISO Image once you have extract ISO CD into single folder on your web server.

Install URL: http://xx.xx.xx.xx/inst/10/32/SP2/ALL
Advanced Boot OS Parameters:
console=ttyS0 xencons=ttyS hostip=xx.xx.xx.xx/24 gateway=xx.xx.xx.xx dnsserver=xx.xx.xx.xx

Please make sure your have correct IP, gateway and DNS setup properly else you will getting error during installation.

Add and remove any disk/storage on Window 2008 or SuSE Linux 10 no downtime or reboot required. The VM guest OS will detect automatically.

Convert to template and VM clone features which are another features behind VMware ESX.

Once you have converted to template, you won’t have another way to reverse back as VM guest machine. It’s one way operation which you will received a warning before convert to template as show below.

Right click VM guest, and click Copy VM will do VM cloning but require downtime. The Copy VM feature is disable during VM guest is power on.

Overall, I would said VMware ESX still my first choice.

But if we compare the technology today, I believe most of us will see that from virtual cpu perspective, VMware had been quite slow respond on that. If you do spoke to most of the VMware representative or consultant, they always told you not to allocate more than 1 Vcpu if not required.

In real world, I believe that non of us will be satisfied with the single core performance for our server environment. Dual core is been in the market for more than 2 years, and quad core had been also popularize to most of us. Single core will just be SLOW in most of the event. I am here to urge VMware to push harder for more virtual CPU per VM. The thing that should consider is to compare with the competitor products like Xen and Xensource.

In Xen, you will allow to configure 8 vcpu per VM if your host have 8 cores. That meant you should able to configure 16 cores per VM if your host do have 4 x quad cores today. I am yet to test with 16 cores per VM as my machine is come with 2 x quad cores.

I even try to run a VM with Windows 2008 which contains 8GB memory and 8 virtual cpu assign. The VM is run on local storage on the SATA disk. The performance on the VM is just fast compare to 4 vcpu VM I had in ESX. Again, not to say VMware is not good, and I strongly believe VMware is still the best today, but they are little behind with the delay of more vcpu per VM.

Basically the new version come with 2.6.18 kernel version of Linux as the host system.

The Xen 3.3.0 features including:

• Power management (P & C states) in the hypervisor
• HVM emulation domains (qemu-on-minios) for better scalability, performance and security
• PVGrub: boot PV kernels using real GRUB inside the PV domain
• Better PV performance: domain lock removed from pagetable-update paths
• Shadow3: optimisations to make this the best shadow pagetable algorithm yet, making HVM performance better than ever
• Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements: 2MB page support for better TLB locality
• CPUID feature levelling: allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models
• PVSCSI drivers for SCSI access direct into PV guests
• HVM framebuffer optimisations: scan for framebuffer updates more efficiently
• Device passthrough enhancements
• Full x86 real-mode emulation for HVM guests on Intel VT: supports a much wider range of legacy guest OSes
• New qemu merge with upstream development
• Many other changes in both x86 and IA64 ports

Download Xen 3.3 datasheet

Download Xen 3.3.0 official source distribution tarball

Download Linux 2.6.18 with Xen 3.3.0 support source tarball