Monday, October 31, 2011

Consolidated server and desktop workload licensing failure

VMware View and a standard vSphere server workload deployment cannot mix. Separate physical hosts, separate vCenters. WHY???
If you have a SMB who wants to get their feet wet with both virtualized Desktop and Server workloads, you're telling them that they need to purchase twice the rackspace to have the same n+1 cluster setup. I can see large shops wanting to keep the workloads (and admins in charge of them) as separate entities, but don't make it a restriction. 


From VMware View 5 Licensing FAQ:
Q: Can I run other server workloads on the vSphere that is included in View?
A: No. The vSphere and vCenter components of the View bundle are restricted to desktop deployments. A desktop virtual machine is defined as a virtual machine running the following operating systems: Windows 95/98, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Business, or Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows 7.
The only exception to this rule are the components that make up the virtualized desktop infrastructure (View Manager, vCenter Server, another Connection Broker and/or any desktop management and performance monitoring tools used solely for hosted desktop virtual machine(s) within an operating system of a server).

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

vSphere 5 vCenter Appliance first take

UTC. Do not change the timezone on the appliance or the embedded DB2 database will not start. 

Also watch for the DB2 logsize: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005259
And the Likewise AD auth needs to be a domain admin, but it won't put the hostname in correctly if it's longer than 15 chars. 

Bugs to work out? Nahhhhh..

Other than those...few..gaping holes, I think VMware's got something going for it. 

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

ESX 3.0 on ESX 4.0

I was trying to run ESX 3.0.3 U1 inside of my vSphere 4.0 implementation (so that I could test upgrade strategies to 4.1).

I set the OS as RHEL 4 (64bit) and specified "Use Intel VT-x/AMD-V" under the CPU/MMU Virtualization Options area (rather than automatic). It seemed to boot fine at that point.
Note that the install went fine without poking in the settings area, but it was just hanging at "vmkernel has been loaded successfully" rather than actually booting into the OS.

Now I can get to work.