Today I received an email from the HyTrust Appliance (HTA) team giving me a great tip about the Community Edition that I blogged about earlier this month. This information will be actually announced officially next Monday, so you get to know about it earlier.

As most of you know, the HTA Community Edition protects up to 3 ESX hosts. However, the configuration assessment capability was left intentionally unrestricted. This means you have the ability to assess the configuration of your entire ESX environment for as many hosts as you want!

Here's how to configure Community Edition for assessment of your ESX hosts:

1. Log-in to the HTA UI with your web browser, or navigate to the "HyTrust" tab in the Virtual Infrastructure Client (if you have the vCenter Plugin installed.)
2. Select "Hosts" from the "Hosts" menu.
3. Press the "Add" button to add a host.
4. Enter the credentials and details of the ESX host you want to add. Make sure that the "Protected" option is unselected. If you forget, don't worry! The CE license of the HTA will refuse to add more than 3 protected hosts.
5. Once you're done adding hosts to the HTA, you can select the check boxes next to the hosts you want to audit, and press "Assess".
6. You're done!

Thanks to the HTA team for allowing me to blog about this great trick before the official announcement.

Apologies to my dear readers for the language, I had to use Brian Madden's "own words" when he said that to his own audience in his VDI vs. TS VMworld2008 session. Read on:

Today I got a marketing email telling me about the "new 33 announced tech sessions" of the BriForum2009, and a promotion code to go and register there. I ignored it since I'm not interested, and kept doing whatever I was doing at that time.

Few minutes later my twitter was flooded with all this "VMware banning competing vendors bla bla bla" thing which was originally posted on this link. Again I ignored it because I know the guy is nuts and he always like to appear as if he's the hero who's saving the virtualization industry all the time. I said I'll just wait for the real VMware story.

And sure enough, a small VMware response appeared here, and then some tweets came in with Brian's new update on his blog. I thought it might be fun to see how he's going to respond to that, and of course there were lots of "I'm the hero" and "I rock" between the lines, which was fine by me until I reached this last paragraph:

"Now I only have one small complaint about their "official" response: They say that text is industry standard for conferences. I think they mean for vendor conferences, because we have no such text at BriForum. "

Well, screw you mister! This is a cheap way to promote your upcoming event which your fellows at techtarget have been marketing about since the beginning of the day, and apparently needed some more attention to the ads you have at the end of your post. Everybody knows that you are a Citrix guy and that's what you are doing for living, so don't you dare pretend to be "vendor neutral" now.

It's not YOU who will come and tell the community that VMware is avoiding the competition in VMworld, and it's not US who put the pressure on VMware to do otherwise. There are so many examples in the last VMworld events showing that this is not the case, and that they are fair. Go check who won for example the "Best of Show" in VMworld2008, it's (Reflex) for a product that VMware were working so hard at that time to come up with an equivalent to, which is known now as "vShield Zones".

Now, on the extremely opposite side, do you remember the Microsoft childish and unprofessional acts at that time with their "Casino chips"? Do you really think VMware will just invite them back and tell them (oh please be my guest, but bring some more this time). They have every right to prevent this kind of things to happen again.

As a matter of fact, I think that VMware is doing a huge mistake inviting both Microsoft and Citrix to VMworld. If I wanted to attend VMworld or even purchase the sessions & Labs for later access, I only do that because I'm interested in VMware solutions and products. Microsoft has its own TechEd, and Citrix has the iForum and Synergy, I would rather go to the TechEd (or again buy the sessions CDs) to have in-depth information from real engineers about Hyper-V rather than watching a bunch of a so-called "myth-busters" coming on the stage talking awkwardly about their product and how it's better than VMware in its own event.

Seriously, what is that? Is this some kind of a joke or what, are we being looked at as if we are stupid and should accept someone coming and telling us this crap!

To all who is reading these lines, I encourage you to go and register for the BriForum below, maybe he'll make some money out of that and save us this cheap ways of marketing in the future.

I just ran into a problem now while I was patching one of my ESX 3.5 servers. I got this message from vCenter:

Insufficient disk space on datastore 'service console'

I SSH'ed into my ESX host and ran the df –ah command which came back with the following:

Apparently I had some big files sitting somewhere on the root partition, and I remembered at once that I was doing some throughput testing from my ESX to the FC SAN and iSCSI targets, so I knew where to go:

And here they are, two iso files consuming 3GB of my precious service console datastore:

Alternatively, you can run the find command with the following syntax to return the file size of your choice, sort them in human readable format and then write them in a text file (here it's larger than 300MB):

find / -type f -size +300000k -exec ls -lh {} \; 2> /dev/null | awk '{ print $NF ": " $5 }' | sort -nrk 2,2 > HyperViZor-FileSize.txt

ALWAYS Keep your Service Console FS clean!

Al Pacino – (Scent of a Woman): "It's a wonderful day for singing a song…it's a wonderful day for mooooooving a long…HOOOWAAA"

Downloads:
Download Page: https://www.vmware.com/download/
Free 60 days Trial: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/index.php?p=vsphere&lp=1

Documentations:
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pubs.html

Third-Party Downloads:
Cisco Nexsus 1000V Trial: http://www.cisco.com/go/1000vdownload

Video Tutorials from VMware:
1 - ESX Installation and Configuration
2 – ESXi Installation and Configuration
3 – VMware vCenter Server
4 – VMware vSphere Client
5 – Networking configuration
6 – Storage configuration (iSCSI)
7 – Create and manage virtual machines
8 – VMware Host Profiles
9 – VMware Storage VMotion
10 – VMware vCenter Server Linked Mode
11 – VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS)

To be updated with the latest and greatest links…Stay Tuned!

When you find a great blog post that you know from the first glance that it's going to be big, you really find yourself dragged to refer to it even if you won't add much.

Eric Gray from VMware, has finally done it! He showed us on his great blog, VCritical.com, how we can run ESX 4.0 as a virtual machine inside a physical ESX host. That's right, not a VMware Workstation, but a real physical ESX server.

Any regular reader of my blog or a follower on Twitter knows that I've been trying to do that since I had my hands on ESX 4.0 starting from the early beta to the RC, but I had no luck doing that. As per Eric, it seems that the new GA build allows you to do this with a little bit configuration tweaks. Eric also mentioned that internally VMware has been running ESX as a VM inside ESX servers with a special build to achieve that.

Which leads me to the question I actually get from people when they know what I want to do: Why would someone need to do something crazy like this?

There are many reasons actually, but here is my personal favorite:
- I want to be able to create a fairly big and complicated ESX labs, and in the same time, I have a fairly huge CPU and memory resources on my existing physical ESX clusters.
- Running ESX on VMware workstation is great, but you are always limited to the amount of memory you've got on your PC/Laptop. 4GB or even 8GB won't really allow you to do much.
- In the Workstation scenario you can't keep your VMs running all the time, you will always have to shut them down to free up your resources.
- Having your ESX servers as virtual machines gives you extreme flexibility, starting from creating as much NICs/Networks as you want, all the way to creating your own libraries for deferent configurations. Imagine now doing that with VMware Lab Manager and the flexibility you can get for building/sharing these libraries with your peers.

Of course everything has its limitation, and one of the things that I can think of right away, is the fact that you won't run some features like FT within a virtualized ESX server. I haven't tried it obviously, but form the restricted CPU requirements for running FT, I don't think it would work in this scenario.

However, I am as much excited about the GA release as many out there now, where I'll finally be able to virtualize ESX 4.0. It's worth mentioning also that, as far as I know, doing the same for other hypervisors is not possible, like Hyper-V or XenServer. So, thanks to Eric for bringing this to our attention, and to VMware for their great flexibility and open mind to allow people to do something great like this.