5nine Software Names Leading Microsoft Virtualization Expert Symon Perriman as VP of Business Development

5nine Software, the leading global Hyper-V virtualization management and security provider today announced the appointment of Symon Perriman to the position of Vice President, Business Development & Marketing. In this role, Mr. Perriman will be responsible for business development and global product marketing, helping to position the company as the industry’s leading Hyper-V management and security solutions provider.

In this new role, Mr. Perriman will develop the company’s strategic direction, business opportunities, community initiatives, partnerships, and alliance ecosystems to enable 5nine Software to enter new markets worldwide. He will bring four years of experience designing high-availability and virtualization technologies for the Windows Server engineering team, which will help the company to provide optimized solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V, Windows Server, System Center and Azure Pack. For the last four years Mr. Perriman led Microsoft’s worldwide private cloud evangelism initiatives, and in this new role he will direct 5nine’s global go-to-market strategy and strengthen the existing product positioning and messaging.

Continue at source.

 

VMware vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2d released

Today VMware released an update to its vCenter Server management solution.

vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2d | 27 JAN 2015 | Build 2442329
vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2d Installation Package | 27 JAN 2015 | Build 2442328
vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 Update 2d | 27 JAN 2015 | Build 2442330

Please make sure to review the release notes and download from vmware.com

While this is a minor release it does resolve many issues previously experienced as summarized here:

 

vCenter Single Sign-On

  • VMware Directory Service consumes excessive memory
  • Backup and restore of vCenter Single Sign-On database might not replicate the data between primary and secondary nodes correctly
  • Attempts to logout through the vCloud Automation Center UI might fail

Networking

  •  
  • Network Interface Cards of virtual machines in disconnected state might get ejected during vMotion
  • vCenter Server, vSphere Client, and vSphere Web Access
  • Virtual machines on ESXi hosts containing NSX Endpoint virtual machines might not power on
  • Update to SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition Server in vCenter Server Appliance to address time zone changes
  • vpxd reports massive logging
  • Accessing the Storage View tab fails with the error
  • Scheduled tasks cannot be created for a different time on the same day in vSphere Web Client
  • The VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails intermittently
  • HTML console cannot be launched with custom port
  • Datastore browser in vSphere Web Client does not overwrite existing files
  • VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails

Virtual Machine Management

  •  
  • Cloning or deploying deploying virtual machines over the network causes performance degradation
  • Alert event is not triggered when one VM has multiple vNICs with same MAC address

vMotion and Storage vMotion

  • The default behavior of DRS has been changed to make the feature less aggressive during cluster upgrade

HP BL460c Gen 9 with Windows Server 2012 R2 no network or intermittent loss of network connection

One of my customers requested me to have a look at their Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 infrastructure. They had a strange problem with the HP BL490c Gen 9 blades. The blades are equipped with a 536FLB Flex 10 network interface card based on a  QLogic 57840S chipset.

The Hyper-V hosts are deployed using the bare-metal deployment in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2.

The customer has 6 blades in a C7000 enclosure. Blade 1 could not ping to Blade 2. However blade 1 could perfectly ping to Blade 3,4,5 and 6. All blades are in the same IPv4 subnet. Another issue observed on a few other blades was that the ping would time out a few times. So ping worked, then it did not work for a couple of pings and then network was okay again.

The customer has tried many things to solve this issue:

  1. placed the blades in a different HP C7000 enclosure.
  2. placed the blades in different slots of the enclosure
  3. swapped the HP switches
  4. installed full Windows Server 2012 R2 GUI.
  5. installed Hyper-V Server 2012 instead of R2
  6. disabled checksum offloading , LSO, RSS, RSC and VMQ
  7. called HP. HP was not able to solve this issue.

This all did not solve the issue. The customer was using the latest drivers for the adapter.

HP Virtual Connect 4.31 dated 2014-10-24
HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2 port 536FLB adapter drivers 7.10.39
HP software package 4.01.12

I deciced to start troubleshooting this from scratch by manually installing Hyper-V 2012 R2. The blade which initially could not ping to Blade 2 now was able to ping. Hmm, wondering why.

Next I installed Hyper-V 2012 R2 manually (no network configuration) and then manage it using SCVMM. SCVMM configured the networking of the host. Still the host was able to ping all other hosts in the same enclosure.

So for some reason when the customer is using the bare-metal deployment from SCVMM something goes wrong with networking.We are not sure what exacty. It could be related to BIOS changes. It seems that as soon as the BIOS of the blade is changed, the next bare-metal deployment will result in network issues.

I will update this post when we know more about the cause of this issue.

 

 

My experience of Microsoft exam 70-534 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

Early January I took the beta exam 70-534 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions. Normal rate for this exam is Euro 150,- but Microsoft offered this for a limited period for free.

My idea was to just book this free exam and see what kind of questions are asked. I did not do any study. Having worked with the Azure IaaS offering but not at all with the PaaS offering I was very curious about the balance of these two services in the exam.

In sort: I guess about 90 percent of all questions were on PaaS. If you do not have any experience on working with SQL, websites, servicebus, scaling and other PaaS offerings do not even try to register for this exam! You will fail. 

If you are mainly into Azure Infrastructure this exam is the one to take: 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions For a Study Guide on 70-533 read this blog of Niklas Akerlund.

The exam starts with about 20 multiple choise questions. Some questions request you to drag and drop certain actions in the right order. Then about 5 scenario’s are presented. You will need to read the situation of a fictive organization which moves to Azure. Each scenario has about 7-10 questions.

There were very few questions on infrastructure components of Azure. Some were on connections like ExpressRoute, Site to Site VPN etc.

Almost all questions were on PaaS like how to scale, how to loadbalance, media services , Servicebus etc etc.

If you have hand-on experiece with Azure PaaS services this exam does not looks to be very different.

This is a great study guide. This is also a great blogpost.

 

 

Save the date! VMware vSphere 6.0 announcement??

VMware has planned their biggest announcement ever on February 2. In fact this announcement will be repeated severall times so people living in various timezones are able to watch the event in their most convinient time.

While nothing has been made public about the content of the online event, it is very likely this will be the announcement of VMware vSphere 6.0.

At VMworld 2014 a couple of new vSphere 6.0 features were announced. For a complete overview of what has been made public see my post on ‘vSphere 6.0 what is new‘

Both Pat Gelsinger, Chief Executive Officer of VMware and  Ben Fathi, Chief Technology Officer will have a speech.

Registration for the event here.

AMERICAS
Date:  February 2, 2015
Time:  1:00 – 2:00 PM PST / 4:00 – 5:00 PM EST


EMEA
Date:  February 3, 2015
Time:  9:00 – 10:00 AM GMT / 10:00 – 11:00 AM CET


ASIA PACIFIC – ASEAN, Western Australia, Hong Kong
Date:  February 5, 2015
Time:  10:00 – 11:00 AM SGT


ASIA PACIFIC – Sydney, Australia
Date:  February 5, 2015
Time:  10:00 – 11:00 AM AEDT


ASIA PACIFIC – Mumbai, India
Date:  February 5, 2015
Time:  10:30 – 11:30 AM IST