Notes From Day One - Session One

We had the normal introduction session this morning where VMware really seem to be pushing their virtual appliances. These are essentially virtual machines which are prebuilt with their O.S. and apps already installed and ready to go, So you don't have to go through the rigmarole of reading the instruction manual and putting 3 Cd's in. They will also be releasing the manager for their new Ace Product as a V.A.

They hope that software suppliers will catch in and start distributing software preconfigured as a V.A.and in fact one of the partners at the event was already doing this. If they make it to easy we could all be out of a job!

VMware have a techie network where you can read blogs WIKI's and support forums. The home page is RSS enabled now as well. See www.vmtn.net

Their are supposed to be only 1700 VMware Certified Professionals in VI3 since October 2006 across emea. With the UK being the biggest area.

They have a new 4 day advanced training course coming along which is supposed to follow on from the basic 4 day "Install and Configure" The new one will be "Deploy Secure and Analysis".

Also an new 2 day Operator course will be available aimed at the likes of operators - good for the South African community perhaps... and by that I mean the NOC and Gordon Cass.

There is also going to be a bootcamp or fastrack which will basically be the two four day courses amalgamated into one.

To really keep the money coming in they are also going to have an Advanced Certification coming out in Q3.  

First session of the day was Vmware Consolidated Backup or Vmware's LAN free Backup for those atheists.

Its an improvement on their initial scripting known as VMSNAP and basically tells the vmtools running on a virtual machine to quieses the disk and run any third party scripts to quiese applications such as SQL and Exchange. Then it copies the contents of a VM off of the SAN on to a local windows disk belonging to a windows server known as a "backup proxy". at this point the normal backup software takes over and backups up the files to disk or tape.

The VCB proxy can't run on the same machine as Virtual Center and it won't work inside a VM with out a hell of a lot of work.

The backup software must use timestamps as its not allowed to write directly to the VM during backup.

Restore of an entire VM is a two step process where you do your normal restore with your backup software then copy the files to a VMFS partition and run a vcbrestore script. There is a trick here where you can restore to a windows share which is actually a mount point on an NFS share on the ESX server to make the process simpler.

There is a bug at the moment where a VM's disks must all exist on the same LUN for VCB to work.