50 Partners To Help You Virtualize Business Critical Applications

I just noticed an article on VMware’s Virtualize Business Critical Applications blog listing all the partners globally that have so far been accredited under the VMware Virtualize Business Critical Applications Program (VBCA) – http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2012/12/50-partners-to-help-you-virtualize-business-critical-applications.html.

Virtualizing Business Critical Applications on VMware Whitepaper

I’ve been reading through a great whitepaper published by VMware recently that covers a number of different business critical applications. The Virtualizing Business Critical Applications on VMware whitepaper has plenty of good guidance for Oracle, SAP, Java, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Hadoop and also covers support and licensing. The paper also includes all of the leading VMware Partners that are accredited by VMware under their Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Competency to provide services to help you virtualize these business critical applications. (<blatant plug>including IT Solutions 2000, my company</blatant plug>).

vSphere 5.1 and vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.5 Deployment Considerations

Some of you may also remember the article I wrote titled Using vCenter Heartbeat to Protect Non-vCenter SQL DB? Think Again!. vCenter Server Heartbeat is only licensed and supported to provide HA and protect certain components. This article will outline what components are supported with the new vSphere 5.1 release and some important design and deployment considerations.

Updating CA SSL Certificates in vSphere 5.1 vCenter Virtual Appliance

Recently I wrote about Updating CA SSL Certificates in vSphere 5.1 which applied to the Windows installable version of the vCenter 5.1 and it’s supporting components including SSO. VMware has now also released the instructions to update the CA SSL certificates in the vSphere 5.1 vCenter Virtual Appliance.

Updating CA SSL Certificates in vSphere 5.1

Over the past few weeks I have been working behind the scenes with a team of people at VMware spread around the globe on the process to successfully change out the self-signed certificates in vSphere 5.1. With the introduction of Single Sign-On in vSphere 5.1 the process is somewhat more complicated than vSphere 5 (ok quite a lot more complicated). But now I’m able to bring you some of the solutions you’ve all been waiting for.

VMware’s Oracle Support Goes 24/7 From Q1 2013

I heard some great news yesterday from the man in charge of Oracle Solution Support at VMware Global Support Services. The Extended Oracle Support Policy that VMware provides for all customers running Oracle Software on VMware vSphere is going to be extended even further.

Planning to Migrate Oracle from Unix to Linux on vSphere

A while ago with much fanfare Oracle announced it would no longer develop it’s flagship software and database for use on HPUX and HP’s Itanium platform due to its perception that the platform didn’t have a solid roadmap. This caused a great flurry of lawyers filing papers on HP’s side. But the end result right now after the lawyers got involved Oracle will still be supporting HPUX for the meantime. But who knows how long this will last. So now might be the perfect time to consider migrating your Oracle databases and applications off the HPUX systems (and any other traditional Unix platform) and onto Linux on vSphere. This article will take you through a high level overview of why you should migrate to Linux on vSphere and some of the important considerations and methods to achieve a successfully migration. This is based on the experience I’ve gained from doing a few successful migrations projects, some of which I spoke about during breakout sessions at VMworld US 2012.

VMworld US 2012 and vSphere 5.1 Launch Roundup – My First VMworld

The twitter wires and blogosphere were ablaze with news out of VMworld US 2012 (August 27 – 30th). This was my first ever VMworld (with hopefully many more to come), and I greatly enjoyed it and I also enjoyed meeting many of you. My direct flight home to Auckland from San Francisco on Air New Zealand was the best flight I’ve ever had, and I got a full 8 hours sleep so I didn’t have any jetlag (Thanks Air New Zealand). But this article is all about my take on the event, what I learned, and vSphere 5.1. I’ve decided to do something slightly different to others, to take it all in, and then write this roundup post VMworld. I’m also going to target this towards the relevance to production and business critical applications environments. I’ll also give you some insight into the sessions I presented, the results and my lessons learned.

Kernel Panic in vShield Manager after Upgrade to 5.1

It’s great to see that a lot of people are starting to consider upgrading to vSphere 5.1 and are upgrading their lab environments.  vCloud Networking and Security is one of the jewels in the crown for VMware and it’s expanded functionality, including high availability, means it is an even stronger candidate for enterprise firewall replacement in addition to it’s use cases with vCloud Director. I had used the previous version in an enterprise firewall replacement project and discussed that in Enterprise Firewall Replacement with vShield Edge and vShield App.

There are a number of considerations when upgrading to vSphere 5.1 covered in my article vSphere 5.1 Generally Available – Important Upgrade Considerations. However a specific issue has come up with some upgrades to vShield Manager 5.1 that you need to be aware of.  This article will try and help address this particular issue.

The Case for Larger Than 2TB Virtual Disks and The Gotcha with VMFS

Hypervisor competition is really starting to heat up. VMware just released vSphere 5.1 and Microsoft has recently released Windows Server 2012 and the new version of Hyper-V. A significant  new feature available now in Hyper-V / Windows 2012 is a new disk format VHDX, which has a maximum size of 64TB. With the new filesystem in Windows Server 2012 (ReFS) the maximum volume size increases to 256TB ( NTFS was limited to 16TB @ 4K cluster size). So how does vSphere 5 and 5.1 compare and what are the key considerations and gotchas? What are the implications for business critical applications? Read on to find out.