Recently my colleague Jon Klaus was installing VMware VIEW4 with a customer as he ran into a problem. In his setup there where two ESX hosts that each held 10 VDI VM’s and when putting one host into maintenance mode, he received a number of error messages: “The licensing limit on the number of running […]
virtual machines
VMware vSphere 4 Implementation by Mike Laverick
VMware vSphere 4 Implementation by Mike Laverick http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/ (expected release: Mid Feb 2009) It was spring 2009 when I was asked if I was interested in doing the technical editing of an upcoming vSphere book from Mike Laverick. I have always known Mike as a professional or even expert on VMware (even after 2 nights […]
Licensing virtual machines: Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter edition?
Licensing remains a difficult problem in today’s virtual infrastructure. Some things are easy to understand and some are not. After visiting a session on Microsoft licensing one day, I heard a number of new things that I wanted to share with you. I will give you a few definitions used in Microsoft licensing and a […]
Smarter Microsoft licensing can reduce VMware environment costs
If you consolidated physical servers with virtualization, you probably did so to reduce the costs of maintaining many physical servers — namely power and cooling, rack space, support contracts, physical hardware and so on.As a consultant, I often work with clients who have embarked on large server consolidation projects, migrated many physical hosts to virtual […]
Using the esxtop tool to identify VMware ESX memory use
As a VMware system administrator, you can monitor memory usage in the VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client). You can also potentially free up a lot of memory throughout your virtual infrastructure by using VMware’s esxtop tool with a secure shell (SSH) client to understand which virtual machines and processes are using memory and making appropriate […]