Starting from VMware Tools 10.0 version, VMware has done these packages downloadable separately from VMware ESXi distributions. They are available here. To see the active VMware Tools version installed in your VM, simply look at VM properties in vSphere Client.

Just recently one of the main virtualization conferences VMworld Europe 2016 has finished. Traditionally, it has been held a while after the main VMworld in the USA. While in the USA VMware was speaking about the new technologies and the future of datacenters, in Europe much more attention was paid to the new features of updated VMware products. The main of them is, of course, VMware vSphere 6.5 server virtualization platform. We’ll start our overview with it.

As far back as 2 years ago at VMworld Europe 2014 conference VMware announced the release of the VMware Horizon FLEX solution. It is a virtualization platform for desktops, which allows running virtual machines locally on users’ computers, both on Mac and with Windows, while connection to the company’s datacenter isn’t available. At the same time, the virtual machine utilized by the user can be Windows-based or have guest OS Linux inside. Many virtual infrastructures administrators still remember that before VMware had VMware ACE and VMware View Local Mode products, which passed long ago and now have been replaced with FLEX technology. Since VMware Horizon FLEX 1.9 version, as well as the new versions of Workstation and Fusion desktop platforms, has been released just recently, let’s look closer at the FLEX solution and consider its key features.

As you know, the main virtualization conference VMworld 2016 arranged by VMware is now being held in Las Vegas. On the first day of the conference several interesting announcements were made. For example, VMware Cloud Foundation, which soon will be available on the IBM platform and later with other vendors, as well, was presented. It allows to get a ready-made infrastructure at customer’s site with both necessary software and hardware components and ready, configured and integrated control and automation tools like NSX, Virtual SAN and vRealize:

As far back as at VMworld 2014, VMware announced VMware Project Fargo technology, also broadly known as VMFork. It allows to make a working copy of a running virtual machine on VMware vSphere platform very fast.

Many of you know that VMware has a technology called vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). It involves launch of Docker (and others) virtualized containers in small virtual machines with a lightweight operating system based on Linux distribution. This operating system is VMware Photon OS 1.0, which has been finally released just recently. This is the first release version of this operating system from VMware, but in the long view it can become the main platform for virtual appliances by replacing the everlasting SUSE Linux.

You may know that memory page deduplication technology Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) becomes useless with large memory pages (it’s even disabled in the latest versions of VMware vSphere). However, this doesn’t mean that TPS goes into the trash bin, because when lacking resources on the host-server, ESXi may break large pages into small ones and deduplicate them afterwards. In the process, the large pages are prepared for deduplication beforehand: in case the memory workload grows up to a certain limit the large pages a broken into small ones and then, when the workload peaks, forced deduplication cycle is activated.

Many of you have heard of Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage technology, which allows essential increasing of storage I/O performance within VMware vSphere environment by using logical volumes for certain virtual machines components and transferring of some storage operations to disk arrays.

Snapshots in VMware vSphere often cause various problems with configurations and performance, unless they are properly used – for live backup of virtual machines and temporary keeping VM configuration before the update. However, using them in large infrastructures is unavoidable. At some point you may need to delete/consolidate virtual machine snapshots (Delete All button in Snapshot Manager), which is quite time-consuming and demanding in terms of storage performance. Thus it would be a good thing to know in advance how much time it takes.