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Posts Tagged VMware

Opinions in IT

Jan 21

Posted by Justin in Miscellaneous, Non-Techie, Technology Related | No Comments

The world of Information Technology as we all know is a very big world, and it only is getting larger and more diverse.  As such, it comes with choices – many of them for that matter.  With choice also comes opinion.  According to Merriam Webster the definition of opinion is:

a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter

In most cases what bloggers write about is their personal viewpoints, or opinions on a topic at hand.  They often include facts, however at some point, if it’s IT related, there will be an opinion.  Let’s take a few examples that exist in the IT world today:

  • Browsers (IE v Firefox v Chrome v Opera)
  • Hypervisors (Hyper-V v VMware v VirtualBox)
  • Operating Systems (Windows v Linux v Mac)
  • Software (Exchange v Lotus v Scalix)

Looking at the aforementioned, there is loads of grey area and what defines the opinion of one versus the other really boils down to the project or question at hand.  IE might be best if you need ActiveX.  Mac might be best if you’re doing graphics design…

One of the greatest IT project management posters/comics I’ve come across is:

project-management

Which describes the IT lifecycle perfectly.  What it signifies in a sense is that everyone has a differing opinion.  Said best by Nietzsche:

“One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed”

And for that reason, IT is one of the most complex fields in the industry.  Everyone is allowed to think what they want and say what they want – it might cause controversy (as my opinion did the other day) – and due to the uncongenial way of reading blog posts, more opinions are formed.  Who is right, it really depends on how you look at it and what the point of the article/opinion was in the first place.  If we all had the same opinion, we’d all be running bland systems with no uniqueness to them whatsoever and IT wouldn’t be fun at all, would it?

So, here’s to another year of opinions, change and choice in the IT field, and just because I’m a Microsoft MVP and most of my day-to-day work is based on Microsoft technologies doesn’t mean that those solutions will be my defacto answer for everything.  What it does mean is that I have a passion for Microsoft technologies and I enjoy sharing that passion with the community, be it at conferences, on my blog, in forums or other various ways.  That said, I’m also got various other non-Microsoft certifications and have installed numerous variants of systems in my years as an IT Pro, henceforth, I’ll share my opinions, taking all of that in to consideration.

Here’s to hearing your opinions :)

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Yet another reason why Hyper-V (or SCVMM) is better than VMware

Jan 19

Posted by Justin in Miscellaneous, Windows 7, Windows General, Windows Server 2008R2 | 20 Comments

Today I got called to a client’s site who recently moved from premises A to premises B.  This meant they turned off their VMware ESX 3.0 server for the first time in a while.  When they relocated they couldn’t authenticate nor could they get to their file/print server.  A quick analysis showed a few things:

  • New building = New IP scheme (ugh)
  • Upon logging in to the ESX web portal, the two servers were still off

Noting this, no worries, in the web portal, lets start them up.  Easy and straightforward.  Now, here’s the kicker.  I wanted to remote control the servers via the console or via the VI client (to look at potentially changing IP addresses or find out what the old scheme was and change it to match/overllap the new scheme)…Wrong move.

The server first told me I had a non-supported browser.  I was using IE 8 (as it is standard with Windows 7).  Ok, no problem, as an IT Pro, I’ve also got other options…Firefox 3.5.7…nope not supported either.  Opera?  Guess what, no go.  Ok, so let’s download the VI Client and do it that way.  Downloaded no problem but when starting it, the woes began again:

only on 32 bit

Thanks VMware.  Your client only works on 32 bit architectures.  So that means most IT professionals who have more than 3 GB of memory can’t use your client?  Oh, one other thing, nice UAC prompt:

contact your admin

Program name: Contact: Your local administrator

OK, so my rant now done, why does this upset me?  Well, Hyper-V can be managed:

  • locally on 32 or 64 bit with RSAT
  • remotely with RDP
  • in just about any browser using SCVMM

Yet another reason why I think I’m going to be sticking with Hyper-V.

NOTE: Yes, I know there are ways around installing the 32 bit client on a 64 bit OS, but I didn’t want to, nor did I have the time, to pull apart the installer with an MSI builder and have it bypass the OS checks.  That’s not my job and that’s not why customers pay VMware loads of money for their software – OH, payment…that’s right Hyper-V is FREE too and it has this functionality in built :)

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InformationWeek and Virtualisation – Take it with a grain of salt

Dec 17

Posted by Justin in Security, Technology Related, Troubleshooting, Windows General, Windows Server 2008R2 | 4 Comments

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I’m a Microsoft MVP, MCT, MCITP, CCNA and hold various other certifications, however when I write articles I will take the view that there might be a better technology out there than Microsoft, but I will ensure I write articles with the proper facts being portrayed and not try to put a “media” spin on things.

OK, now that’s over, let’s look at what has got me revving.  A bloke called Elias Khnaser has written an article for Information Week entitled “9 Reasons Enterprises Shouldn’t Switch to Hyper-V”.  He didn’t put a disclaimer at the top, but Elias works for a company called Artemis Technology and if you go to their “Partner” page, Artemis is a VMware Enterprise Partner and they consider this their one of their “Spotlights” compared to their Microsoft Gold Partner status which is just listed as a valued partner.  (UPDATE: since writing this article, the logo has changed to include their areas of expertise and has been fixed, however at the time of writing the logo was “warped” and furthermore if you moused over it, the description about the partner was set to “information to come”, whereas all of the other valued parnters seemd to have descriptions).

Anyways, let’s look at the article…

1. Breadth of OS Support….:

Hyper-V, however, supports only Windows and SuSE Linux

Hmm:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported-guest-os.aspx

Microsoft support more than just Windows OS’s and SUSE.  Here’s another page I’d like to steer Elias to:

http://boincstats.com/stats/host_os_stats.php?pr=bo&st=0

OK, so it’s a piece of software, but what does it say? Yep, that says of the top 15 OS’s 12 are Microsoft’s, so why support such a breadth of OS’s if there’s no need to…Anyways, I digress.  Let’s carry on:

2. Memory Management

In this article it goes in to Memory management and talks about how Microsoft just say throw more memory at the situation whereas he states VMware can overcommit and utilise more memory…Interesting, in contrast to this article:

Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3

That white paper clearly states:

Avoid frequent memory reclamation.  Make sure the host has more physical memory than the total amount of memory that will be used by ESX plus the sum of the working set sizes that will be used by all the virtual machines running at any one time.  (Note: ESX does, however, allow some memory overcommitment without impacting performance by using the memory management mechanisms described in “Resource Management Best Practices” on page 12 [of this document].

key word of course is *some*, yet everyone knows you never overcommit memory in a production environment (thanks to my friend Mitch Garvis for the heads up on this one – A Brief Discussion of Security with Regard to Resource Over-Commitment in VMware)

3. Security

Well, don’t get me started on this one as VMware has a kernel infrastructure that means if you inject one malous driver in to the Hypervisor layer it can (and will) affect EVERY VM you have.  Hyper-V does it differently.  Here’s a reference for the differences:

http://4sysops.com/archives/the-difference-between-the-microsofts-hyper-v-and-the-vmwares-esx-hypervisor/

Biggest difference is microkernalised hypervisors versus monolothic hypervisors.

4. Live Migration

Well, lets look at this one.  In order to do it with VMware, it’s not as straight forward (oh wait, it’s not mentioned in this review of *one* paragraph) as it seems either.

5. Priority Restart

Seems as though the spin on this paragraph is going down the clustered route not a priority restart route.  He mentions Exchange, IIS, SQL all of which, you don’t want a VM infrastructure to *move*.  You want them highly available via clustering, not a VM management utility or tool…

6. Fault Tolerance

Not sure where this one is heading, but again it seems like he’s letting VMware control the applications, something any good system administrator (see third party software and reliability).

7. Hot Adds

All I need to say is CSV and I don’t mean comma separated values.

8. Third Party Vendor Support

Please list some…Furthermore, I’d ask why (and 9 is maturity) if VMware is so much better, do they need third party products to make their product good?  Hyper-V has SCVMM R2 and that’s all you need, period.

9. Maturity

Sure Hyper-V hasn’t been around long, but you have to admit, it’s gaining ground on VMware at a very fast pace now that the R2 version is out and the “kinks” have begun to be ironed out…

Morale is,  it seems this story has a load of FUD in it and that proper research wasn’t done in order to make it impartial.  Next time an article like this is written, maybe it should be prefaced with the caveat the author is a VMware addict or seems to be trying to have it out for Microsoft Hyper-V, for whatever reason that might be.

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ESXi meet Hyper-V Server

Oct 2

Posted by Justin in Technology Related | No Comments

Just when VMware decided to make ESX free in the form of ESXi, Microsoft have come along with Hyper-V Server – the free edition.  Obviously based on Windows Server 2008, slimmed down version – none the less, you can get Hyper-V server for free and only have to subsequently pay for the licenses of the servers you run on it – similar to ESXi.  Similar to ESXi, there are “limitations” but to get you out of the starting blocks, this baby surely will do the trick.  Pop over to Microsoft and check it out for yourself!

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