The VMguy

A special thanks to Eric Siebert who nominated me for the top 20 bloggers and the top 100 VMware & virtualization people to follow on twitter.  If you use twitter, you’ll definitely want to check out these lists.

ok, now I’ll have to write more to keep my status!  New post coming tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks Eric.

At long last, Site Recovery Manager 4.0 has been released.  Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes:

This release of Site Recovery Manager introduces several new features:

• Full compatibility with vCenter 4.
• Full support for NFS-based arrays.
• Support for shared recovery sites.
  Enables many-to-one pairings of protected sites with a recovery site. For more information, see the technical note Installing, Configuring, and Using Shared Recovery Site Support, which is available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.
• Resilience in the face of vCenter unavailability during a test recovery.
  Placeholder virtual machines can be quickly repaired after the protected site vCenter becomes available again.
• New repair-mode installation features.
  You can run the SRM installer in repair mode if you need to change configuration parameters such as vCenter credentials, database connection information or credentials, and certificate details.
• Graphical interface to advanced settings.
  Eliminates most requirements to edit the XML configuration file
• Support for DB2 as an SRM database server.
• New licensing options.
• Improved scalability.
  A single protection group can now include up to 1000 virtual machines.
• Full Compatibility With DPM (Distributed Power Management)
  SRM recovery plans can now power-on or power-off a host that is in standby mode.
• New Option to dr-ip-customizer Utility
  The dr-ip-customizer utility now logs less verbose diagnostic output by default. To force dr-ip-customizer to log the same level of diagnostic output that it produced in earlier releases, use the -verbose option.
• Change in Certificate Validation
  When you select certificate authentication, the SRM installation validates the certificate you supply before continuing. Certificates signed with an MD5 key are no longer allowed.
• Support for Protecting Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines.
  SRM can now protect virtual machines that have been configured for fault-tolerant operation. When recovered, these virtual machines lose their fault tolerance, and must be manually reconfigured after recovery to restore fault tolerance.
• Improved context-sensitive Help.
• PDF documents available on release media
  Current versions of the PDF documents for this release are available in the docs folder at the root of the SRM 4.0 CD. Updated versions of these documents may be available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.

Many of you may have heard a rumor that the Enterprise Edition of vSphere was going to be discontinued at the end of the year leaving only Standard, Advanced and Enterprise Plus.  There were a few mentions of this in the early vSphere materials presented to partners and customers.

I am very happy to report that this is not true. VMware notified the channel partners yesterday that Enterprise Edition of vSphere will continue beyond the end of 2009.  This is great news for customers wanting additional choices in their licensing options.

Having said that, please be aware that there is a current promotion for upgrading vSphere editions.  Please note that these heavily discounted prices for upgrading licenses ends December 15th, 2009.  If you are considering upgrading, don’t wait till the end of December or you’ll miss out on the promo pricing.

A new version of Fusion is available today: 2.0.6.  Mostly a maintenance release with primarily bug fixes.

Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes:

VMware Fusion 2.0.6 is a maintenance release of VMware Fusion 2. It is a free upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1 and VMware Fusion 2 customers, and provides the following enhancements:

• Fixes multiple issues when running VMware Fusion 2.0.x on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (32-bit kernel mode)
• Provides improved 3D performance on Macs with NVIDIA graphics cards running Mac OS X 10.6
• Contains fixes for more than 20 bugs

You can download the updated version here.