Now deploying vSphere 5. Although there was an uproar amongst the community about the new memory licensing model, in practice most installations would not be affected, as VMware have allowed sufficient memory in each licensing bundle.

Just back from the Hyper-V & Windows Server 8 partner event. Can't say too much, but there are some big improvements in Windows Server 8 that will make using Hyper-V a better experience. As soon as the Beta is released I'll be setting up a full lab with shared storage, so check back soon to see how it goes.

Just spent a good time playing with DPM 2010. Certainly a big improvement since I last played wtih DPM2007. Makes DR very easy.

This is the latest VMware guide to performance troubleshooting, updated for ESX 4.1. This comprehensive but easy to read guide will assist in find any performance bottlennecks in your virtual environment. If you need help, give us a call.

VMware have released a new Acceleration Kit for vSphere Standard. Placed between vSphere Essentials Plus & vSphere Advanced, it is more scalable than Essentails with more features. Plus right now there is a 40% discount for customers upgrading from Essentials Plus. See more here http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/standard-ak-promo/index.html

Just in case you got bored with the GUI tools, here's the latest command line reference for the hardcore geeks. Enjoy.

 

  If you have ever had to deal with a Data Recovery Situation, be that an e-mail recovery or a complete database restore, you will appreciate that you must have stringent backup procedures in place to ensure you can access this data.

We are always keen to test out the latest features provided by manufacturers, so we've implemented VMware Storage I/O control on our own VMware 4.1 environment. We seen performance improvements on multiple storage processes, i.e. running simultaneous storage vMotions on Virtual Machines did not mean other storage I/O process slowed down, so end users were not impacted by IT back-office maintenance tasks. Thus we could carry out heavy storage I/O tasks during the day where normally we would have scheduled these processes out of hours. Storage I/O Control is only available on vSphere 4.1, and only VMFS 3.46, so you'll have to upgrade all your Hosts & reformat your VMFS Datastores.

VEEAM Backup & Replication v5 with vPower has been released. Initial tests are showing good replication results, but we have yet to configure the more advanced features like vPower (recover directly from backup), Instant VM Recovery,U-AIR (Universal Application Item Recovery - especially want to see how this lets you recover Exchange messages). There are loads more features in v5, and we’ll be testing it here in Qualcom to see how these new features work out, so keep checking back in for the results of our tests.