In vChat Episode 26 David, Eric and myself cover the latest news and happenings in the world of virtualization including EMC World prep, HP Discover, regional VMUGs, and much more (don’t forget home labs and iPads) – don’t miss it!

 

In this vChat we covered:

• EMC World Labs
• HP Discover
• TrainSignal New Courses – vCloud Director, Advanced vSphere Networking and Scott Lowe’s Designing vSphere Infrastructures
• Varrow Madness 2012
• Upcoming Charlotte Regional – May 2012 – Scott Lowe, Alan Renouf, William Lam, and Eric Siebert & Other regional VMUGs
• UK Regional VMUG
• HP Microserver for vSphere lab
• Mention of Drobo, Synology NAS,
• iPad as laptop replacement with Zagg Keyboard with CloudON
• vScience LLC Workshop
• vExpert 2012 announcement & vTexan vExpert Post
• Dropbox, Google Drive, VMware Octopus

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).

When installing a virtualized instance of VMware ESXi 5 on top of a physical ESXi 5 instance you may receive the following warning message: <HARDWARE_VIRTUALIZATION WARNING: Hardware Virtualization is not a feature of the CPU, or is not enabled in the BIOS>.

As the warning message suggests the reason you are getting the error message is that the virtualized ESXi 5 host that you are trying to install has detected that your (virtual) server isn’t able to (ie: the virtual hardware being presented out by the ESXi hypervisor running on the physical server hardware) the ‘hardware virtualization’. 

 

 

You may also want to checkout my recent post here that covers a similar issue which covers the “This virtual machine is configured for 64-bit guest operating systems”, “However, 64-bit operation is not possible.”, “Longmode is disabled for this virtual machine.” error message and how to resolve it.

Iomega have released a new update to their popular PX NAS series of devices. This new series of “Server Class” PX devices sees a number of improvements over the standard PX NAS series that have been on offer for almost a year.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Iomega PX NAS series, they are shared storage devices that offer both freestanding and rack mount NFS and iSCSI storage using Ethernet connectivity, and between 4 and 12 (depending on the model) SATA and/or SSD disks.  These NAS storage appliances are targeted a the SMB, remote office and distributed enterprise market space.

At this point you are probably asking yourself, “Ok, so how are they different than the standard PX series NAS devices?”

 

What’s New?

The answer is that the “Server Class” PX series has a new version of the EMC LifeLine software (v3.2) running on the PX which provides new advanced enterprise type features, along with it using enterprise grade SATA drives that are designed to be run continuously 24×7, thereby providing a significant increase in reliability and mean time between failure.

Below: Spot the difference – a “standard” & “Servers Class” Iomega PX

The PX NAS devices are compatible with various video surveillance systems which almost always run 24×7 so the introduction of the more robust hard drives will no doubt be welcome news for some.

The new LifeLine (v3.2) storage management software sees the addition of some exciting new features and functionality – in summary:

• Faster File System:  A licensed version of Linux Tuxera  of the XFS file system which will apparently provides improved performance.
• Volume Encryption:  Allows you to secure your data on the PX.
• Power Management:  Schedule the PX device to turn off and on, thereby providing power cost savings.
• Wake-on-LAN:  Turn the PX on via the network.
• PX Configuration: Back up and restore a PX’s configuration, making it easy to roll out ‘standardised’ configurations to multiple PX devices.
• Cloud Storage Integration:  Integration with EMC’s Cloud based storage service, Atmos, thereby providing another option for the backing up the PX’s data up into “The Cloud”.

 

The PX Models

The  Iomega PX NAS devices are available with capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 3TB models, with the 1TB PX model being new to the family providing with a lower entry price.  There are two form factors of PX model, freestanding/desktop and rack-mount each with a varying number of physical drives that will meet most SMB size requirements and budgets.

For more detail on the different models available click on this link here.

 

 

It is good to see the various drive configuration options available which no doubt adds a element of flexibility to the decision making process when looking at buying a PX NAS, especially if budget is a major factor.

Although I personally don’t have a requirement for a “Server Class” PX in my own lab environment I do see the benefits of having this option available to SMBs and for larger business remote offices where local IT support is not always on-hand.  As with most shared storage devices/appliances the component that most commonly fails is almost always the hard disks so providing additional disk robustness to a shared SMB storage solution such as the Iomega PX is no bad thing.

The additional features provided by the new LifeLine v3.2 operating system software is the most promising aspect for me, with the increase in storage performance via the Linux Tuxera XFS file system being the most exciting of the new features.

The update to the LifeLine v3.2 operating system will apparently be made available to existing non-“Server Class” models of the PX, so look out for an update sometime in the future.

 

In vChat Episode 25 David, Eric and myself welcome special guest, VMware Super-Social-Media-Evangelist, John Troyer (@jtroyer) to announce the virtualization top blog results, as of February 2012.

Watch the full episode below to hear the top 25 blogs and the winners of each of the new top blog categories, or click here to view all the results over at vSphere-Land.com

 

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).

You can now SUBSCRIBE TO VCHAT on iTunes!

I’ve just been informed by the one and only Betsey (@BetseyBolton) here at EMC  that there is a full and exciting line-up of virtualization related EMC webcast for the month of March.  Take a look at the list of available webinars this month and if you’d like to register for one or more of them you can do so here:  http://emcinformation.com/48102/LP/.ashx?reg_src=PA_VMware

Our March EMC and VMware webcast series offers these topics:
Transform Your Data Center – Physical to Virtual – with VNX and Avamar
Thursday, March 1, 2012
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Discover how EMC VNX unified storage and EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and system offer the ideal solution to virtualized infrastructure challenges.
Register now >>

---

vFabric Data Director: How Virtualization Changes Databases
Thursday, March 8, 2012
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Join EMC and VMware for an overview of the core concepts behind database virtualization, and how enterprises can benefit from putting these ideas into practice.
Register now >>

---

Optimize Data Paths with EMC PowerPath/VE for vSphere
Thursday, March 15, 2012
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Learn how EMC PowerPath/VE automates and standardizes data path management across VMware infrastructures, providing faster application performance and high availability.
Register now >>

---

Accelerating Easy VMware Recovery with Replication Manager
Thursday, March 22, 2012
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Find out how to protect your VMware environment and mission critical applications. What’s more. learn how you can quickly and efficiently replicate and recover Virtual Machines from any type of outage or disaster.
Register now >>

---

Chad’s Choice – Virtually Any Virtualization Topic!
Thursday, March 29, 2012
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Uncover the latest virtualization news—from amazing new technologies through performance troubleshooting to future product development—with Chad Sakac, Senior Vice President, Global System Engineers, EMC.
Register now >>

A TechHead reader recently experienced the following message in VMware vSphere (ESXi) when trying to start a 64-bit VM (Windows 2008 R2) running on their HP Proliant ML110 G5: “This virtual machine is configured for 64-bit guest operating systems”, “However, 64-bit operation is not possible.”, “Longmode is disabled for this virtual machine.”.  This is an error that can often crop up especially when dealing with nested VMs or when deploying new ESXi hosts. The typical reason for this message is typically:

• The additional virtualization related extensions on the CPU haven’t been enabled in the BIOS.  These extensions in the BIOS aren’t always turned on by default, although they are in most modern servers.  If the CPU(s) in your server does have the virtualization extensions though you suspect they are simply just not enabled, reboot the server, enter the BIOS, enable the extensions (the location in the BIOS will generally differ between server brands), save the BIOS settings and then reboot the server.  For Intel based processors there are the Intel VT-x virtualization extensions and for AMD processors, AMD-V.  For more in depth information on these virtualization related CPU extensions check out this article here.

OR

• The CPU(s) in your server don’t have the virtualization extensions available on the CPU, although almost all modern CPUs these days come with them.

OR

• If you are trying to run nested VMs (ie: running a VM inside another VM) then you will likely need to configure a couple of extra parameters.  An example of a nested VM is running a W2K8 R2 VM on a virtualized ESXi 5 host or perhaps on VMware Workstation or Fusion).  Luckily setting these parameters is quite straight forward and there is a very useful VMware article here that takes you through how and what to set.