Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category

Must-have Certifications for IT Pros

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

There are some certifications that are nice to have and others that are simply “must haves” in today’s competitive job market. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the certifications that IT Pros must have to be relevant today and some that will be gaining increased importance in years to come.

1. Project Management Professional (PMP)

The role of a project manager is to serve as the intermediary between the IT project team members and the key individuals who are involved with a project. A project manager tries to ensure that a project is completed in a timely manner and within all budgetary and legal constraints. The typical scope of project managers responsibilities include overseeing the processes and methodologies used for the successful completion of the project. The successful project managers can not only help save money for their company, but can also by ensuring all timelines are met (which some would argue is also money as well). There is a growing demand for skilled and competent IT project managers. These are the PM’s who can work through a budgetary crisis and conflicting resource priorities.  (more…)

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VMware changes vRAM licensing on vSphere 5

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Last few weeks a lot of talk has been about the new VMware licensing for vSphere 5. Many reported how this would work against VMware’s principle of running as many VMs on one host as possible. After the dust had settled, people started checking their own situations and found that things weren’t as bad as they looked in the first place but for some the new licensing policy would still mean a substantial cost impact.

When reading all the comments, people weren’t complaining about the vRAM model, but mostly about the entitlements. A vSphere 5 Enterprise license would give you a 32GB vRAM entitlement per CPU and 48GB vRAM on Enterprise Plus. Many thought this was much too low.

Well, there is some great news. I picked up on a rumor which will make a lot of people happy. Personally, I never thought VMware would change the licensing policy and especially not in such a short time. A big company like VMware would need weeks and maybe months to change their plans, but I stand corrected. VMware used the customer feedback and changed the vRAM entitlements. My compliments!!!

The new policy:

  • VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlement
  • VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlement
  • Max vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAM
  • VMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB ( <- my assumption)
  • VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GB
  • VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GB

The amount of vRAM that counts against your vRAM license pool will be capped to 96GB per VM !!! In other words, even if you assign 256GB or the new 1TB limit of RAM to a VM, it will only count as 96GB for your license.

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VMware vSphere 5 leaked features

Monday, May 30th, 2011

ORLANDO, Fla. — VMware vSphere 5 is expected to include Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler, host-based replication and several other new features.

These improvements were part of the vSphere roadmap presented here at this week’s Partner Exchange conference.

VSphere 5 will be out in the second half of this year, but the release will be before VMworld, according to VMware product managers who led the roadmap session. That puts the vSphere 5 release date in July or August. The subsequent vSphere release, due in 2012, is expected to add a service-level agreement (SLA) framework and long-distance vMotion.
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Cannot Access Farm from Citrix Delivery Services Console

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

When launching the Citrix Delivery Services Console after installing XenApp 5.0 or Presentation Server 4.5 on Windows Server 2003, the XenApp node is missing. The administrator is unable to configure the farm.

A recent Microsoft update to .NET Framework 2.0 is the cause. Some of the files necessary for the .NET Framework, or the Delivery Services Console, might not have registered properly during the installation of the XenApp management consoles.
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VMware vSphere 4 and Citrix XenServer 5.6 Pros and Cons

Friday, May 13th, 2011
Virtualization is indeed a significant solution to maximize the resources utilization, increase reliability and availability. Further more, virtualization simplifies portability and administration and faster deployment.

Since virualization has a big market, it is also highly competitive. Having big players behind the solution should give us advanced key benefits over one another. Here we will try to understand the present top two Server virtualization products and their advantages and disadvantages.
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LTO-5 for data backup: The cure for storage woes?

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

For years, tape storage systems have played a key role in efforts to store data for backup and retrieval, archiving, and contingency planning purposes. More recently, tape has been called on to help preserve and safeguard data to meet data retention laws and regulations. The challenge is how to manage, retain, and safeguard the data volumes being generated today. To put the data explosion issue into perspective with respect to its impact on tape, consider that even in last year’s tough economic times shipped disk storage capacity grew at a remarkable rate. All of the data being placed on that new disk capacity needs to be backed up, and much of it must also be retained for long periods of time. New tape technology provides a solution. With a capacity to store 3 TB of data per cartridge, recently introduced Linear Tape-Open (LTO)-5 tapes offer twice the storage capacity of LTO-4 and about four times the capacity of LTO-3 systems.  

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VMware vs. Citrix vs. Microsoft

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Server virtualization is no longer a one-horse race, as Microsoft, Citrix and others compete more convincingly with market leader VMware

 VMware has enjoyed a long run as king of x86 server virtualization, and the pioneering vendor remains the one to beat when tallying enterprise market share. But its competitors, particularly Microsoft and Citrix Systems, are gaining ground as IT executives begin to view server virtualization not only as a means to cut costs in the data center but also as a baseline technology for enabling cloud computing. 

VMware introduced its first x86 server virtualization products in 2001. It wasn’t until a few years later that the first commercial versions of the open source Xen virtualization hypervisor hit the market, and Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V followed in 2008. 
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