This new video from KBTV is about upgrading the vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 by using a script. vCenter 4.1 is not supported on 32 bits systems any more.  In case you do have your existing vCenter on 32 bit system, you have to reinstall, or choose another server and install the server with 64 bit Microsoft operating system.  There is a new script present on the installation ISO which you previously downloaded from VMware’s Website. The script is present in the root of the installation media in the folder called datamigration. By running this  script you’ll be able to migrate your vCenter Server .

What you must do?

You must first unzip the file containing the script (to the local c: drive for example), then stop the vCenter and Vmware  update manager services. Then with a command prompt type backup.bat in the C:

Then you just copy the whole folder from your c:\datamigration to your new 64bit Server via the network for example.

On the new vCenter Server first put the DVD with the vCenter 4.1 into the DVD drive. Type Install.bat in command prompt and follow the informations asked in the script (like if there is a netbios name change or drive letter of your DVD drive).   After those questions, the installation is launched.

This video compliments KB article 1022137 vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations. and describes the process for using our Data Migration tool to upgrade VMware vCenter Server 4.1

One community site we always keep an eye on is David Davis’ VMwareVideos.com.
Yesterday was the first ever vChat (episode 1 / “The Pilot”), with Simon Seagrave and David Davis discussing the new vSphere 4.1 and its top 15 killer features.

vChat is a regular virtualization video chat covering VMware vSphere, Cloud Computing, Virtualization News, and maybe some geeky humor. Regular contributors are 3 vExperts – Simon Seagrave (TechHead.co.uk), Eric Siebert (vSphere-Land.com), and David Davis (VMwareVideos.com).

vChat is sponsored by vSphere Video Training from TrainSignal.com

vChat – Episode 1 – New vSphere 4.1 – Top 15 Killer Features from Train Signal on Vimeo.

This week VMware announced general availability of VMware vSphere 4.1 with three main themes that are core enablers of cloud computing: Efficiency, Control, and Choice.

This video features VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod, introducing 4.1.

Anyone who has been to VMworld knows that they give you a great backpack to carry all your stuff around and to put all of the freebies in (and there are a lot).

Last years backpack was green and had loads of pockets, my only dissapointment with it was that the tassles for the zips were leather, and broke easily. Most of us ended swapping them out for key chain rings and then the backpack was perfect. Mine has been across the globe with me over the last year and prooved invaluable!

John Troyer and Luke Kilpatrick check it out in this video! It’s grey too!

The guys from MacFormat.co.uk know their stuff, and this video just proves that. It’s simple enough to in concept, but is just nice to watch…. It’s Windows… on an iPhone!!

They use VMware Fusion and AirDisplay to achieve this. All in all we were quite impressed!

This video was released by PHD Virtual back in May during the transition period where esXpress became “PHD Virtual Backup for VMware“.

It details how to use the setup wizard. Enjoy!

Last week Eric Sloof posted an interesting blog post on his VMware training sessions relating to the module where the ESX and virtual machine memory is covered.

He explains how important it is; not to use the virtual machine memory limit setting, and very often students believe him after checking out their own production environment for ballooning activity and 9 out of 10 times they find a few virtual machine which have a memory limit configured. The memory limit is the upper limit on memory the ESX host makes available to virtual machine. Host memory reclamation happens regardless of the current host free memory state.

For example, even if host free memory is in the high state, memory reclamation is still mandatory when a virtual machine’s memory usage exceeds its specified memory limit. If this happens, the ESX server will employ ballooning and, if necessary, swapping to reclaim memory from the virtual machine until the virtual machines host memory usage falls back to its specified limit.

He also on included on the post a video which shows you the “Proofpudding” and some useful links about this topic.

Don’t use memory limits – Proofpudding from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Great post Eric!

Over the last week I’ve seen an number of blog and forum posts mentioning CloudSwitch.

What is CloudSwitch you ask? Well you can now explore the cloud now with the free version of CloudSwitch Explorer.

CloudSwitch lets you move up to five VMware virtual machines to the Amazon EC2 cloud simply and securely with no modifications. It also supports Windows and Linux! apps.

Why CloudSwitch?

Cloudswitch’s website answers this question with 4 points!

1. Security – Make the cloud a secure extension of your data center with full encryption & isolation
2. Point & Click – Point-and-click your existing apps into the right cloud with NO changes
3. Existing Tools – Use your existing management tools and policies with cloud resources
4. No Lock-In – Get cloud scaling and agility with NO lock-in – run your apps where you want them

BlueLock is one of the four hosting providers that joined the VMware vCloud program and that currently offer a vSphere-based cloud infrastructure powered by vCloud Express.
The company planned to declare its offering out of beta at the end of March, but at the very last minute it changed its mind and postponed the launch.

The company is making a huge effort to promote the VMware cloud, mostly now that the vCloud Service Director (vCSD) is about to hit the market, and convince customers that it can work better than Amazon EC2. Now my opinion is that they both have their advantages.

Part of this effort turned into this 10 minute video, where the company compares the two Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing offerings. Now as they are promoting the VMware cloud this video my be slightly bias, but it’s still worth a look!

On Friday VMware released to the community a video demonstrating how the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature, part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1, works.

SIOC provides the capability to define quality of service prioritization for the I/O activity on a single host or a cluster of hosts.
The prioritization, which can be enable or disable on specific datastores, is enforced through shares and limits.
The ESX/ESXi hosts monitors the latency in communication with the datastore of choice. As soon such latency exceeds a defined threshold the datastore is considered congested.
At that point all VMs accessing that datastore are prioritized according to their defined shares.
The administrator can even define the amount of I/O operations per second (IOPS) that each virtual machine can reach.

The video shows SIOC in action and is really worth checking out!

This article’s content was primarily sourced from Yellow Bricks!