Mike D’s Blog

This news is big. Just 5 days ago I was talking about how important license mobility is in the cloud environment. Today, VMware and Novell announced that VMware will offer full support from VMware GSS no less for SUSE Linux. You can call VMware’s toll-free number and get support for the OS and the virtualization environment in one stop. What’s even better is this announcement also makes it so you can transfer your SUSE environments from your enterprise to a VMware powered cloud without having to worry about licensing constraints. That’s huge on all accounts.

As part of this partnership VMware will also begin to standardize the appliances we’re shipping on SUSE Linux. Previously a lot of the appliances that went out the door were on CentOS because of the rather generous redistribution rights. With the new VMware-SUSE partnership we can now standardize on a more main-stream Linux distribution that’s supported throughout the enterprise.

Good news all around. I just hope we continue the push with other Linux vendors that are out there or they at least follow suit with the license mobility aspect of this announcement. You can read more about the announcement on the VMware News site.

Tags: Licensing, Linux, Support

I’ve been working with several customers around the world on building out their cloud offerings lately. One thing that you’ll find as you build out the cloud is that you will start to leverage APIs and SDKs you probably have never had to use before. This goes along with one of the 3 main skills I talked about in an earlier post. What you may not know is that VMware actually offers full support for development using the APIs and SDKs.

The VMware support site has a full write-up on the fairly new program. Regular VMware vSphere support provides support for the installation of the APIs only. If you have questions about what API to use, how to use it, or why it’s not behaving properly then the new program is for you. You can add this program to your existing support contract by contacting your sales representative or partner.

I’m really happy that VMware is finally offering support for the SDKs and APIs and it’s just in time for everyone to go out and start building your own clouds. I hope you find this program useful.

Tags: Programming, Support, VMware

A couple of weeks ago I posted about SQL Server running in a VM and how disk writes were assured to happen in contradiction to a poorly written article on SQL Solutions. After working with VMware Engineering there’s now a KB article that talks about how and when I/O writes happen with different VMware products. Below is the full text of the KB article. You can also find the source here.

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Eight new ESX configurations have been approved by Microsoft for support under the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The new configs allow up to 64 GB memory in any virtual machine. This is an increase from the previous 4 GB limit, and will be useful to customers deploying Exchange Server, SQL Server, or any memory-intensive application. All future SVVP configs will be listed at our product’s maximum memory limit.

Under SVVP, any customer will be supported by Microsoft when running any of a long list of Microsoft products on VMware. Any version of Windows back to Windows Server 2000 SP4 is also supported, including all OS roles such as Active Directory, File Services, etc.

Four new ESX 3.5 update 2 configurations are posted now for both Intel and AMD processors. Four more ESX 3.5 update 3 configurations should appear before mid-month. ESXi configurations for u2 and u3 are in progress as well.

Microsoft’s formal support policy for virtual platforms is here. VMware’s web page describing Microsoft support is here.

These new configurations now allow full Microsoft SVVP support for maximum VM sizes on VMware’s platform. They also exceed all other competitive hypervisor certification levels. Kudos to the team at VMware for the hard work on these certification tests as well as to Microsoft for a great certification and support program. As always, I hope other large ISVs take note of this and follow suit soon.

I was reading through one of my more favorite blogs (vinternals) today and it was brought to my attention that Symantec does not support VMotion. I found that a little shocking. No real reason was given for this in the Symantec KB other than intermittent communications. I highly doubt that’s because of VMotion since (a) VMotion doesn’t occur very often and (b) network communication isn’t dropped with a VMotion. And if you’re not going to support VMotion on VMware then where is the lack of support for live migration from the other vendors which operates in the same manner? It sounds to me like someone over at Symantec doesn’t understand what’s going on. Time for some alliances work. In the mean time I agree with the vinternal guy – customers need to push back on Symantec and tell them it’s time to belly up to the virtualization bar and start doing some real troubleshooting of their issues.

(Via vinternals.)

UPDATE (11-20-2008):

Symantec has updated their support policy. Apparently the old link above was a premature KB article that accidently got released. Good to see they do know what’s going on. Here’s the new link.

Microsoft sure is keeping up their end of the deal on SVVP. They recently added SQL Server 2005 to the list of supported applications. I had always wondered why that one was missing since most customers hadn’t upgraded to SQL Server 2008 just yet. This is more good news for Microsoft support in a virtualized environment. I just wish the other major vendors out there (Oracle in particular) would get a clue and follow Microsoft’s leadership on this.

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The short answer is yes. I get the question a lot from customers so I thought a short blog post with the details would be in order.

An update on the Exchange support issue – it’s supported as of September 1, 2008 under SVVP.

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There’s a good write-up of the University of Plymouths Exchange 2007 virtualization project. I just met with 2 customers this past week that both asked about virtualizing Exchange 2007. They both brought up the two biggest questions on Exchange virtualization: what about performance and will Microsoft support it. There’s good answers for both.

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VMware recently submitted some new test results to Microsoft’s SVVP certification. The new results can be found here. This includes higher memory limits as well as certification for 32-bit or 64-bit on Intel and AMD processors. Testing continues for even larger workloads as well as more operating system flavors.