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Take a look at what happened this week in the world of server virtualization through quotes from VMware Forum 2012.

Take a look at what happened this week in the world of server virtualization through quotes from VMware Forum 2012.

Virtual host resources are the lifeblood a virtualization project. Finding ways to extend them will promote growth, even during lean budgetary times.

Green initiatives aren?t just for data centers. Reducing electricity use and preventing e-waste at home can be as simple as using free VMware software to virtualize desktops.

Yesterday I received an email from someone. He wanted to know why he was limited to using either the “fixed” or “MRU” pathing policy for the LUNs attached to his MSCS cluster. In his environment they used round-robin for everything and not being able to configure all of them with the same policy was against their internal policy. The thing is that if round-robin would be used and the path would switch (by default every 1000 I/Os) the SCSI-2 reservation would need to be re-acquired on this LUN. (MSCS uses SCSI-2 reservations for their cluster devices) As you can imagine that could cause a lot of stress on your array and could lead to all sorts of problems. So please do not ignore this recommendation! Some extra details can be found in the following KB articles:

• http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033678
• http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1037959

VMware Forum 2012, a traveling conference for VMware customers and partners, stopped in Boston this week. If you weren’t able to attend, here’s a look at what you missed:

VMware rolled out the red carpet for attendees at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, which vaguely resembles an airplane hangar.

Attendees milled around before the general session, which kicked off the event. One keynote speaker, Benjamin Gray, principal analyst at Forrester Research, spoke about how organizations are shifting toward more BYOD- and cloud-based models. And Vittorio Viarengo, vice president of end-user computing at VMware, talked about how VMware is responding to the evolving challenges that are present in today’s data centers. He also showed a demo of View 5.1.

Here’s a look at the partner pavilion, where dozens of vendors and solution providers showed off their products and services. VMware’s booth featured demos of several products, including Horizon Application Manager.

Kaspersky Labs had one of the more engaging booths in the partner pavilion, where attendees could race toy cars around a track. I’m not quite sure what it had to do with antivirus software, but it got people over to the booth.

On a side note, I launched my car off the track on the first turn.

Feeding time at VMware Forum. I quickly learned not to get in the way of an IT guy and his boxed lunch.

My lunch came with a ham and cheese sandwich on a pretzel roll, Cape Cod chips and a chocolate chip cookie. Everything tasted great, except the promotional card for Dr. Dre headphones.

The event ended with a series of breakout sessions, such as this one, “Accelerate your Journey to the Cloud with Storage for VMware.” VSpecialist James Ruddy explained the different ways to architect storage arrays in cloud infrastructure.

Just a second ago the GSS/KB team republished the KB article that explain the vSphere 5.0 problem around SvMotion / vDS / HA. I wrote about this problem various times and would like to refer to that for more details. What I want to point out here though is that the KB article now has a script attached which will help preventing problems until a full fixed is released. This script is basically the script that William Lam wrote, but it has been fully tested and vetted by VMware. For those running vSphere 5.0 and using SvMotion on VMs attached to distributed switches I urge you to use the script. I expect that the PowerCLI version will also be attached soon.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2013639

Despite the hoopla over ditching Windows Server, RHEV 3.0 still requires Internet Explorer. But configuring IE doesn?t need to be a hassle.