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By admin, July 13, 2011 10:34 am

Today VMware announced the release of VMware vSphere 5.0 by surprise! The following is  some of the key features of this release: 

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines.
• New Virtual machine capabilities. 32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Software support for 3D graphics, and more.
• Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts.
• Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage.
• Profile-driven storage. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources.
• VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance, and provides Internationalization support.
• Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows Storage vMotion of a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots.
• vSphere Web Client. A new browser-based user interface that works across Linux and Windows platforms.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance.
• vSphere High Availability. VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform.

Here are some of the reasons why I’m excited about this: 

• App Aware API.  This is the same API that has been used by Neverfail’s vAppHA and Symantec’s ApplicationHA products.  Now with 5.0, this API is publicly available.  This means anyone can craft a solution that allows for the monitoring of a application and interfacing with vSphere HA to restart the VM.  Couple this with the new vSphere Web Client’s ease of extensibility and you have the potential to do some great things.
• Ever had DNS resolution cause you issues when using vSphere HA?  With 5.0, all dependency on DNS for vSphere HA has been removed!
• IPv6 is now supported.
• Logging.  There have been a lot of improvements to the log messages with vSphere HA.  This was done to make the log messages more descriptive than ‘unknown HA error’ and should help with identifying configuration issues.
• Several user interface enhancements.  Now you can see more detailed state information about the hosts in your cluster and what role they play with vSphere HA.

The changes to the vSphere HA infrastructure now eliminates the primary/secondary constructs that existed in previous versions of vSphere.  Replacing that is a master/slave model.  In this model, one of the hosts is designated as a master, while the other hosts are designated as slaves.  The master coordinates most of the activities within the cluster and relays information to and from vCenter.

For now though, the reason why this is so great is that you no longer have to worry about details such as what hosts act as your primary nodes and which ones act as secondary nodes.  If you are installing vSphere HA in a blade chassis or making a stretched cluster, this is excellent news for you!

Heartbeat datastores is a feature that allows vSphere HA to utilize the storage subsystem as an alternate communication path.  Using heartbeat datastores allows vSphere HA to do things like determine the state of the hosts in the event of a network failure of the management network. Which brings up another enhancement to be excited about:  management network partitions are now supported in 5.0!

Finally, vSphere 5 has changed entitlements around CPU cores and memory use. The company has lifted licensing restrictions for cores per processor and RAM per host. It’s also eliminated the “advanced” version of vSphere plus, leaving just Essentials, Essentials Plus, Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. vSphere 5 has also introduced a small change to the entitlement process around what is known as virtual memory or vRAM.

You must obtain new licenses to deploy VMware vSphere 5. Your existing VMware vSphere 4 licenses will not work on vSphere 5.

For more, please refer to What’s New in vSphere 5.0 and vSphere 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging Whitepaper as well as Compare VMware vSphere Editions.

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By admin, July 12, 2011 12:57 pm

Wow! This French girl does know how to twist her body!

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By admin, July 11, 2011 10:31 pm

Today, I found Symmantec Antivirus has stopped updating its definition again due to space shortage, and I’ve tried everything to squeeze the last drop of space from my w2k3 without success, the original installation was back to mid-2004, at that time, 5GB is more than enough for the root C: dirve.

However after almost 7 years with all the patches and installed programs, it gradually filled up the C: drive to about 500MB left, so this leaves me no choice but to take the risk by using Acronis Disk Director to expand the partition.

First, I took a snapshot of the powered down VM, and then Edit the VM property and found the disk size has been gray out! Why? I don’t know, but after deleting the snapshot, I was able to expand the disk again, then took a snapshot again just to make sure.

Boot into Acronis Disk Director and I found there was no disk found due to SCSI controller was Paravirtual, changed to LSI Logic Parallel (LSI Logic SAS didn’t work) solved the problem, and the rest expanding the partition was just a piece of cake! I later found out there is no need to use Dell’s ExtPart utility as Acronis Disk Director did it all for me.

The interesting part was when Acronis Disk Director moving the blocks, it estimated 30 mins to re-arrange a 50GB partition, but at the end it only took less than 8 mins to complete the whole job, thanks to Equallogic’s fantastic 15K RPM Raid 10 IOPS capability! (Average Read/Write is about 2,000 IOPS, it’s quite high for two on-going parallel jobs)

Just to be cautions, if there is anything goes wrong, I still have the snapshot, the backup from Acronis True Image Server as well as my last resource Veeam backup, so it’s pretty safe to do the above with 3 different kind of backup on hand. Of course, I always forgot to mention there is the 4th hidden backup, it’s the Equallogic snapshot, but it’s the very last resource if all 3 backup methods failed to restore.

One more thing to take care of is the left over snapshot as I found the VM disk type automatically became Thick from Thin, this is due to the snapshot in the previous step, simply remove it will revert the disk to Thin again, nothing to worry about, but the removal process surprised me as it did took quite a long time to complete, if you know why, please let me know.

Boot up the VM and everything is back to order again. Back in the old days, when we perform a disk space upgrade, we often need to use Acronis True Image to clone all the partitions, then take out the old disks, normally raid 5 with 3 disks, and then insert 3 bigger size disks again and create a new raid 5 volume, finally restore it using CD-ROM, the whole process can take up to 4-5 hours to complete if you are lucky and need to cross your finger to pray no bad things happened!

Wow! I must admit that I love the benefits of virtualization and the magic of Equallogic more and more everyday!

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By admin, July 5, 2011 12:15 pm

I don’t like most of the modern ones, but this one is an exception! This song is also used in the movie “Sex and The City 2″ trailer.

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By admin, July 4, 2011 2:23 pm

十分的昂貴價錢 !
八分的觀眾氣氛 !
五分的3D效果 !

總結﹕不值﹗

但這場賽事絕對是萬分的精彩﹗Djokovic今年氣勢如虹﹐之前連贏40幾場賽事﹐只輸了一場(法網半決賽給Federer)﹐今天王者得愿以嘗﹐新一代的球王就此產生了﹗恭喜﹗恭喜﹗

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By admin, July 2, 2011 9:38 pm

今天重返20年前的母校﹐掀起了大家無數的記憶。

在那充滿Art Deco氣息的樓梯上﹐曾經留下了你我的腳印

�
在模糊的記憶時空裡﹐我們的確有過那麼一段曾經在同一屋檐下的難忘經歷。

當年那些各奔東西的同學們﹐你們還記得大家嗎﹖

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By admin, June 30, 2011 10:10 pm

我們口中所謂的Bad Luck很多時候都是自己幻想編織出來的﹐而且古人有曰“塞瓮失馬﹑焉之非福“。

面對這些未能預測的將來﹐很多時候我們都會感到迷茫和不知所措﹐這是正常的。身邊的朋友家人都經歷過不同的人生山坡﹐最後的勝利總是屬于那些有毅力堅持到終點的人們﹗

記住只要有信心﹐就可以克服這些暫時的困難﹗

而且你有關心你的家人和朋友﹐其實無論發生什麼事﹐還有我會在你身邊﹐別怕﹗

突然想起前天Post的那首歌原來是上天精心安排今天給你聽的﹐真巧﹗

Look how far we’ve come my baby
We mighta took the long way
We knew we’d get there someday

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By admin, June 28, 2011 10:57 pm

最近內地很紅的郭美美Baby事件“妹不怕”的原曲原來不是新加坡歌手郭美美的版本﹐而是一隊歐洲組合的原創“Dragostea Din Tei ”(又名The Numa Numa Song)。

其實還有個搞笑的肥仔版本﹐竟然有2千2百萬次點擊﹐完全超越了之前所有的原創﹗

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By admin, June 28, 2011 6:55 pm

Microsoft indeed has made the whole installation thing much easier than before!

Starting with the 6.5GB ISO download, it took about 2 hours to complete, then create a new VM with W2K8R2 as the OS type which SBS2011 is actually based on.

Shortly I found out the ISO won’t allow me to continue as I have less than 120GB of free space? Does it really require that much? OF COURSE NOT! (later found out it only took 22GB after the clean installation). In order to continue, I gave the VM 160GB with thin provisioned disk and 2 vCPU with 4GB Ram. The installation did take 2 hours to complete considering the ESX host is a pretty powerful and modern one, most of the time went to the part “Expanding and Installing Files”, although that process said only 30 mins.

After reboot, simply follow the installation wizard such as setting up the domain name, IP address (Must use a Private IP, note this, I think MS wants people to use SBS2011 in an Intranet behind the firewall/gateway only!), administrator username and password, then login via RDP. To my surprise, I found the default Administrator account got disabled! (why is this? Due to security reasons?) I have to manually enable it from the Active Directory User Console in order to use this account to copy files to the disk.

Wola…a new SBS2011 server is ready with all the latest version of IIS/SQL/Exchange and more…for only USD545, you got the Essentials Edition with 25 users and NO limit on CALs and if you need 75 users, then it’s only a bit more, USD1096, we can now say SBS has finally reached to a state that most of the SMBs can really afford and make the good use of it!