At last week’s New England VMware User Group meeting in Atkinson, New Hampshire, there was no shortage of cloud talk.
Guy Bowers, senior systems engineer for VMware, started off the morning with his keynote on using Lab Manager to configure and set up virtual environments that can be disposed of once used, and he also touted vCloud Director as the tool for “providing the interface, automation and management required by enterprise and solution providers to build public and private clouds.” Attendees were still buzzing that vCloud Director will most likely be Lab Manager’s replacement, which is a conversation that really began at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.
A VMware marketing and sales representative, who chose to remain anonymous, said cloud security continues to be the main concern voiced by potential customers. Data privacy and protection anxieties have weighed down cloud adoption since its introduction, despite the onslaught of new security tools and services from industry leaders, including IBM and EMC.
The second part of the keynote focused on virtualizing Microsoft Exchange with vSphere. Here are the top best practices to follow when testing Exchange in a vSphere cloud, according to VMware:
1. Don’t over-commit memory.
2. Set the memory to the configured size of the virtual machine (VM).
3. Make sure to right-size the configured memory of a VM
4. Enable VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to ensure workloads are balanced
The keynote also highlighted hot topics from VMworld, including a summary of the top five labs at the conference:
1. VMware View 4.5 installation and configuration
2. VSphere performance and tuning
3. VMware ESX 4.1 new features
4. VCloud Director installation and configuration
5. Basic vSphere installation and configuration
