Veeam have just released some White Papers all written by VMware vExperts. See Veeam's complete series of white papers here or click on our latest additions below.

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

by Eric Siebert, VMware vExpert, Senior systems administrator at Boston Market

“New VMware vSphere and its vStorage technology improve data protection and disaster recovery. The White Paper explains how organization of all sizes can reduce storage utilization by 30%, increase the full backup speed by 50% and incremental backup speed by 90%, lower the cost of near-CDP by 80% while increasing reliability.”

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp

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Yesterday, QLogic announced that its 2nd Generation, Single Chip, 8100 Series 10Gb Converged Network Adapters are now certified by VMware for ESX/ESXi 4.0. This is key because a number of end users have been waiting for VMware to announce certification for 2nd Generation CNAs since QLogic announced the industry’s first 2nd Gen CNAs in March 2009 with support for only Windows/Linux.  EMC, IBM, and NetApp are already supporting the 8100 Series CNAs today. The combination of QLogic second generation CNAs with VMware vSphere 4 enables customers to attain a higher degree of data center efficiency — an Intelligent Converged Data Center.

The 8100 Series 2nd Gen CNAs are the first 2nd Gen CNAs to be listed on the vSphere 4 HCL. This is key because the 2nd Gen CNAs (in comparison to currently shipping 1st Gen CNAs in the market) offer:

• 150% higher FCoE performance
• 1/3 the power consumption
• Standard PCI Express form factor which enables the adapter to be deployed in any leading rack/tower servers with PCIe x8 or larger slot. Current Gen 1 CNAs are compatible only with a limited set of server models due to its large size.
• Compatible with the latest released standards for FCoE

Below is the URL with more details on the new certification.

http://ir.qlogic.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=85695&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=1358476

A collegue of mine just gave a me a few tips on how to view the logfiles on an ESX Host in Real-time. Normally I would export all of the logs via the VIC or the vm-support command. But this limits me to only seeing what has happened, not what is currently happening.

Using the VMware Infrastructure Client, you can view some of the logs in real-time, but there is only a small amount of logs to choose from.

So how is it done? Read the rest of this entry »

A fellow VMware enthusiast and personal friend Simon Seagrave, has announced that his website http://www.techhead.co.uk has been shortlised for a Computer Weekly Blog Award. The actual award title is: Individual IT Professional Male

If you haven’t seen the TechHead website, you really should get yourself over there an have a browse. There are some great resources there, including some ‘Hot Deals‘ on IT kit which are always handy!

If you agree with me, and you think its an awesome site please, please, please spend a few minutes of your time to vote for Simon.

Here are the steps you need to follow to vote: http://www.techhead.co.uk/techhead-shortlisted-for-computer-weekly-blog-award-2009

Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s.

Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the Windows version. I’m not great with Linux, and as this is an open source application, documentation is a little hard to come by. So for me, this post is also to remind me how on IPerf works should i need to use it again.

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I awoke this morning with a long list of alert emails from the VCP4 Beta Exam thread on the VMTN Communites forum. By logging into your Pearson Vue account you could Finally!!! find out your VCP4 Beta result.

As you can see i passed. A huge sigh of relief was let out when i saw that.

Now to find a job………Anyone??

You may or may not know that the next London VMware Usergroup meeting is being held next Thursday 24th Sept. I will be in attendance and i will be looking forward to putting some faces to names, and of course a few beers afterwards.

Here is the info about the Usegroup meeting for anyone who doesn’t know about it.

Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here. Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm.

To register your interest in attending,please send an email to alaricdavies at yahoo dot com with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting.

Here is a copy of the agenda:

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Who would have thought it!! I only set it up to help me revise for the VMware VCP4 Beta Exam.

3 Months later, it now has over 60 Questions (increasing all the time). I receive emails daily thanking me for helping them prepare for their VCP4 exam.  People as far away as New Zealand are being told to use my Exam’s and Study Notes by VMware instructors.

But the most amazing part was when i checked Google Analytics to see how many people are using it:

I never expected it to be soo popular. As you can see the hits per day are increasing at a steady rate, so i’m going to do my best, to keep adding more resources, to make sure you visitors have a reason to keep coming back.

This morning I awoke to two Emails from Twitter titled “Your account has been suspended” (Not quite sure why they felt the need to tell me twice).

Written in the Email was the following;

If you are one of my Followers you will know that earlier on this week someone/something got hold of my username/password for my Twitter account and used it to spam all of the people I follow. As soon as I found out, I changed my password and removed any Twitter apps that could have been used to gain access to my account and since then there has been no more spam.

So why have Twitter done this? I have opened up a Support Ticket with Twitter to try and find out.

Update: Just found out that Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks has also had his Twitter account Suspended.

No sooner had I opened the ticket, the ticket was showing as “Solved”. I checked my account, it was still suspended! So I have re-opened the ticket and I await to hear back.

Whilst looking into making The SLOG available on mobile devices i came across something that i had seen in CSI and also in the magazines of a recent flight. Its called a QR Code (QR = Quick Response).

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