Archive for April, 2009

Installing your own Debian OS on an OVH Dedicated Server

Apr 28, 2009 Blogs

As a promotion, OVH has been giving away free dedicated servers for a full year. I was quick to respond to the promotion, and have been using my free server for a couple of weeks now.

As the hardware is rather limited, I meanly use it for some backup and easy downloading purposes:

  • CPU: Intel Celeron
  • RAM: 1GB
  • Disk: 250GB
  • Uplink: 100Mbit
  • Traffic: unlimited

As I was trying to get the OpenVPN client working, I noticed that OVH uses heavily modified kernels to optimize performance. The downside is that these kernels aren’t modular and hard to modify.

I decided to try and install my own Debian OS onto the box. Unfortunately, there’s no DRAC/ILO/IPMI card present, so I cannot simply boot an ISO or physical CD. Here’s what I had to do to get the Debian network installation working:

(see here for a bash script that does it for you)

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On Truth and Reality (#2)

Apr 22, 2009 Blogs

In my previous post I promised a multi-post detailed story about the whole Microsoft vs. VMware thing. As the list goes on and on, I had to break this up into two posts to remain readable. There was just to much to tell!

Let’s jump back onto the horse:

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On Truth and Reality (#1)

Apr 21, 2009 Blogs

One of my previous posts is a publication of a presentation I gave for my company, together with Sander Berkouwer. In this presentation, we concluded that Microsoft and VMware have somewhat equal virtualization offerings. As I work for an independent IT-services company, we need to maintain a unbiased view of the virtualization market. This means, that Sander and I simply are trying to implement a VMware, Microsoft or Citrix solution to best fit our client’s demand.

In order to maintain the independence of our employer, our colleagues need to be well informed about the solutions we are offering. This was the main reason for giving the mentioned presentation. In this presentation, we demo-ed the next-generation virtualization products from both Microsoft and VMware for our colleagues. We stated that both solutions have pros and cons, and that, depending on the customers’ demands, either solution will be most suitable for them. This opinion works out great, because OGD can do both Microsoft and VMware implementations.

As a freelance blogger on Virtual Lifestyle, however, I have a different opinion: VMware is the best virtualization solution money can buy.

Seen from a global overview, both companies have a solid virtualization solution. When you zoom in on the details, you’ll notice those little details that make a world of difference. It’s just these details that make VMware the best virtualization provider, and make Microsoft’s solutions to be needing years and years of improvement before it can even pretend to be in the same league as VMware.

In the next couple of posts, I will dive into these little details to further explain my point:

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vSphere Linking galore

Apr 21, 2009 Blogs

While the news is spreading over the internet, I am going to keep record of the best, most informational blogposts that pop up in the following days. Here’s a headstart:

Announcements:

New Features:

Screenshots:

Licensing:

One big step for VMware, one giant leap for virtualization: VMware launches vSphere 4

Apr 21, 2009 Blogs

On april 20th, John Troyer announces the general availability of VMware’s new flagship product, VMware vSphere 4:

Introducing VMware vSphere 4 – The Industry’s First Cloud Operating System

VMware vSphere 4: The Industry's First Cloud Operating System.

VMware Unveils the Industry’s First Operating System for Building the Internal Cloud—VMware vSphere™ 4.

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Joep Piscaer speaks at the first annual OGD seminar

Apr 16, 2009 Blogs

WARNING: The following presentation is in Dutch!

My employer, OGD, held its first annual seminar on the tenth of april. This seminar is targeted at internal employees (all 800 of them), and is ment to give new or slightly unexperienced colleagues an insight in what our company has to offer.

One of the presentations called ‘Virtualisatie onder Vuur’, and offered a glimpse of the new virtualization platforms of both VMware (vSphere) and Microsoft (Hyper-V R2). In this duo-presentation, Sander Berkouwer, a Microsoft MVP for Directory Services and myself, vExpert, battled on multiple levels.

We battled as MVP against vExpert, product manager Microsoft against product manager VMware, colleague against colleague, and lastly, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 against VMware vSphere. Of course, we all know who won on all counts :) .

Besides informing the attendees about the new features in both products, the presentation needed to be funny, to entertain our collegues. That was a job well done by us, as the crowd didn’t stop laughing all the way through.

You can watch the 50 minute presentation below. Again, I warn you that all of this is in Dutch.

UPDATE: I have updated this post with the information below.

As OGD is an totally independent company that delivers IT-services, we need to maintain an unprecidented view of the virtualization market. That is the main reason that the conclusion of this presenation is that both VMware and Microsoft have a solid virtualization offering. However, this is not my personal opinion. This weblog is, and will always remain independant and unbiased. This means that while I did publish the video of the presentation, I do not necessarily agree with the statements and opinions made.

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Single pa(i)n(e) of glass

Apr 7, 2009 Blogs

I’ve been playing around with Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2, and I am amazed at how Microsoft can praise their solution as having a single pane of glass, i.e. a single management interface.

After installing a couple of Hyper-V nodes and a physical Windows 2008 R2 x64 machine for AD and SCVMM, I started configuring the environment. I needed a grant total of seven tools to get it up and running:

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