VM-Net

VMware are starting to release information on the VCP certification process for vSphere 4. Apparently there will be four possible paths to achieve the VCP certification on vSphere 4 depending on your current VCP certification.  If you are new to VMware certification you will be required to attend the vSphere 4 Install, Configure, Manage course before taking the exam . This course should be available late June 2009 after VMware have completed the beta process for the exam.

If you are currently a VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3 you will be required to take and pass the vSphere 4 exam. This option does have a deadline. If you are a VI3 VCP you will have until 31st of December 2009 to take the exam otherwise you will need to attend the VMware vSphere 4 Whats New course and then take the vSphere 4 exam.

If you are a ESX 2.x VCP you will have to take both the VI3 and vSphere VCP exams before the end of the year. Finally if  you have attended either the VI3 Install and Configure or  the VI3 Secure and Analyse course  but have not taken the VI3 VCP exam yet you need to either take the VI3 VCP exam or attend the vSphere 4 whats New course before taking the vSphere 4 exam.

In an earlier post I stated that  some of the VMware other products were rumored to have compatibility issues with vSphere 4. It looks like these rumours were indeed true and  a number of products do have  issues with both vSphere 4.0 and with vCentre 4.0.

The good new is that VMware have indicated that all incompatibilities will be resolved in the second half of 2009 according to the following compatibility matrix shown below.

When or if VMware will give a more precise time frame for each product remains to be seen but given that these incompatibilities effect both VMware’s View 3  and there Site Recovery Manager products one would hope that VMware will resolve all issues early on into  second half of 2009 rather at the end.

As expected VMware today announced the release of it new flagship product vSphere 4. Billed as the industries first operating system for  building the internal cloud VMware vSphere is the next evolutionary step in IT computing enabling customers to bring the power of cloud computing to their IT infrastructures. VMware vSphere comprises a number of components that promise to transform industry standard hardware into a shared, main-frame like resilient environment with built in service level controls for all applications. The components of VMware vSphere are classified into two main groups as shown and described below.

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Up until recently VMware released very little information about how it uses virtualisation internally. The first time VMware released any information was during its VMware US event in September 2008. However during this years VMworld Europe 2009 event, held in Cannes, Tayloe Stansbury VMwares CIO, in his presentation (DC35),  provided a further interesting insight to the extent VMware uses its own products to support its day to day operations.

According to Tayloe Stansbury VMware has an internal VDI deployment of over 550 users, covering most of its departments. The client configuration includes Wyse V10 Thin Clients, Dell 24 inch monitors (configured at 1920×1200 pixels, 15bit resolution), keyboard and mouse.

The server configuration runs on HP c7000 blade systems, EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage and Cisco 3020s switch modules for the HP blades. The entire infrastructure is powered by VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1 for US and View 3.0 for Europe.

VMware has an internal virtualized mail server deployment serving 7800 mailboxes. The entire infrastructure is powered by 29 virtual machines (split in two data centers) running Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition. 22 of them are just for the mailboxes, the other 7 work as Client Access Servers (CAS).

VMware virtualizes its entire ERP infrastructure except Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).  With 97% of the company servers are virtualized across one Tier 4 and two Tier 2 data centers just two applications are missing (one is Oracle RAC). EMC DMX4 is used as the storage backend of choice for mission-critical applications, otherwise EMC CX3-80 is the choice.  The front-end servers of choice are HP c7000 blades everywhere.