Trouble Recomposing View 5.x Desktops After Upgrade to vSphere 5.0 U2

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my View environment from 5.0 to 5.1.2. Just before I attempted the upgrade I also applied the latest patches to all my hosts taking them up to vSphere 5.0 U2. This is where some fun started, but fortunately to avoid some of this fun the solution is very easy.

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.

vCert Manager – Changing VMware SSL Certs Made Easy

During my VMworld session presentation INF-SEC1282 Automating Security and Compliance with DR (VMworld account required to access recording) I gave a world premier glimpse of a prototype solution that will allow completely automated management of SSL Certificates in a vSphere environment. The solution is still under development. But if you’d like to peak into the future of an easy and completely automated SSL management world for vSphere then this article is for you.

Security Guides on VMware.com Have A New Home

VMware has just announced that all their security hardening guides now have a new home. A single page that customers and partners can visit for all the latest hardening guides for vSphere and other VMware products. The url is http://vmware.com/go/securityguides. I would suggest you bookmark this now and visit it regularly.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

IO Blazing Datastore Performance with Fusion-io

Thanks to Simon Williams (@simwilli) from Fusion-io  I’ve had the opportunity to try out a couple of the Fusion-io ioDrive2 1.2TB MLC cards over the past few weeks. I was also provided with ioTurbine software, which combined with an in guest driver acts like a massive read cache and still supports vMotion. ioTurbine’s objective is to allow you to consolidate many more systems on the same server without having to have lots of RAM assigned to act as IO cache to get acceptable performance. This article will focus on the raw IO performance when the Fusion-io IODrive2 cards are used as a datastore. I will follow up with another article on ioTurbine when used with Linux when testing high performance Oracle Databases.

Fight the FUD – Oracle Licensing and Support on VMware vSphere

I keep hearing stories from Customers and Prospects where Oracle appears to be trying to deceive them for the purposes of extorting more license money from them than they are legally required to pay. I also keep hearing stories of Oracle telling them they would not be supported if they virtualized their Oracle systems on VMware vSphere. This has gone on now for far too long and it’s time to fight back and stop the FUD!

In my opinion the best way for you to prevent this situation for your company is by knowing the right questions to ask, and by knowing what your obligations are. The aim for this article is to give you the tools to pay only what you legally owe, while making the most efficient and economic use of your licenses, and get the world class support that you are used to, even in a virtualized environment on VMware vSphere. All without sacrificing availability or performance.

The Good, The Great, and the Gotcha with Multi-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5

One of the features many people may not be aware of that was released in vSphere 5 is Multiple-NIC vMotion. This is a feature that allows you to load balance a single or multiple vMotion transmissions over multiple physical NIC’s. This is of significant benefit when you’ve got VM’s and hosts with large amounts of memory, as vMotion migrations will complete significantly faster. So your Business Critical Applications with large amount of memory and CPU’s can now migrate without disruption even faster. Below I’ll briefly cover the good and great of this technology and also a gotcha that you need to be aware of.

Third VMworld Session – Virtualizing Oracle: An Architectural and Performance Deep Dive

I’m not sure if I’m lucky or just a glutton for punishment. But I have picked up a third breakout session slot at VMworld and I will be co presenting with Mark Achtemichuk (@vmMarkA on twitter) who is a fellow VCDX and performance specialist in the VMware Technical Marketing Team. The session is APP-BCA1624 – Virtualizing Oracle:  An Architectural and Performance Deep Dive. If you have an interest in virtualizing Oracle and getting the best performance then this will be a session not to be missed. Here is the session abstract to wet your appetite.

10 Reasons to Migrate Oracle Databases from Traditional Unix to Linux on vSphere

This article provides an overview of what I believe are 10 good reasons why you should seriously consider migrating Oracle Databases off traditional Unix platforms to VMware vSphere based on my experience managing, designing and implementing such projects.