Virtuozity

VMware has released an update of their P2V product vConverter. The new version vConverter 4 is now capable of virtualizing Windows Server 2008 and even Linux boxes, which is great news. If you are an enterprise customer, you will receive the update via vCenter because like the predecessor the product is fully integrated as a vCenter plugin.

After installing and activating the plugin you will find a new entry called "Import Machine" in the context menu in most views of vCenter. You can also create a scheduled task to start converting at any time you like.

Link: http://www.icomasoft.com/powerscripter

Dennis Zimmer emigrated from Germany to Switzerland and founded his new company "icomasoft". Their product "VI PowerScripter" is a GUI that simplifies the use of PowerShell scripts and comes along with a bunch of handy templates to start from. Definitely not for PS gurus but if you don't have the time to script or to work yourself into the PowerShell, this tool will make a real difference for your daily administrative routine. Just check it out, there is a 15 day trial period.

Link: http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/

Fault Tolerance (FT) is one of the new VMware products that will come out in 2009, and from my point of view it's one of the most exciting. So what does it do? To put it simple, FT provides Zero-Downtime VMs with a single click. And that is a real bargain compared to VMware HA.

So what's the story with FT? In the past I had some really unpleasant experiences with clustering software. The first problem is that most approaches are pretty proprietary, which makes most solutions difficult or unintuitive to manage. Mistakes are almost preprogrammed if you put them into production too quickly. The second disadvantage is the need of additional hardware resources. And the third, but most important drawback, is the famous "Split Brain Problem" all clusters should be able to deal with. Maybe you agree with me that most available cluster solutions on the market today are not a piece of cake to deal with, but require serious training and experience.

But now there is VMware FT and deals with it all? Somehow, yes, it does. It makes proprietary clustering software obsolete by simply cloning the whole VM on to a second one in real time. The VM is unaware of being "clustered", because the second box is an exact replica hold on standby. If one host fails, the secondary VM is automatically activated. VMware calls this technology "vLockstep".

So you will get rid of your proprietary cluster software and you can even make mission-critical applications high-available that were never designed to be clustered. Is this the end of all other clustering solutions? No, it's not, because VMware FT only takes care of the box, not of the application, just like VMware HA did. So if you reboot your primary VM, so does the secondary one, because they are completely synced.

Don't get me wrong, I still think this product is great news and delivers what HA promised, but there are serious limitations and it will definitely not make application clustering obsolete. And we still have to deal with "Split Brain", because someone has to decide which host is down, which one is alive and which VM is the active one. At the moment I guess the algorithm will be the same as in HA.

Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vip-svmotion/

There is a nice SourceForge Project for the neglected SVMotion feature. Since VMware does not provide any integration into the vCenter GUI, Schley Andrew Kutz developed a vCenter plugin on his own that delivers if you don't like the command line. Great stuff, check it out!

Link: http://vmware.com/go/powershell

I strongly encourage you to check out the new version of the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for PowerShell. There are lots of new cool cmdlets for you to discover... Just be sure to run it with PowerShell 2 CTP3, not PowerShell 1.0 as VMware proposes, because afaik the toolkit was developed with this version and some cmdlets might not work properly otherwise.