Launched on September 4th, vReplicator 2.1 is the latest version of Vizioncore’s virtual machine replication suite. Previously called esxReplicator 2.0, the update is a good choice for firms that want to create and maintain replicas of their virtual machines (VMs) that are ready to run on secondary servers just in case something goes wrong with […]

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Vizioncore vCharter Pro is designed to help VMware ESX Server administrators manage the utilisation of system resources such as RAM, CPU and disk allocations. It monitors resources used by ESX Server systems and also of the VMs they are running. If you’ve seen its predecessor, vCharter, it’s important to understand that vCharter Pro is not […]

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We explain how to create a simple server virtual machine (VM) running Ubuntu Linux 8.0.4. We chose Ubuntu because it is well supported both by free on-line documentation and also by services companies that you could pay for help and advice. We assume you are running VMware Workstation 6, but these instructions would work just […]

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This article explains how to set up a Ubuntu server as a virtual mail host. The resulting server could be used as a bastion mail server, which accepts email from anywhere on the Internet, provided the email is addressed to a domain hosted by your network. A further HowTo explains how to convert this configuration […]

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We explain how to update our Bastion Mail host configuration so it could be used as an internal mail server, which would accept mail from any user that is logged into this server – they could be connected from anywhere on the Internet, provided they have a user account defined in the “virtual” table in the […]

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VMware Update Manager v1 comes free with vCenter 2.5 (VC25) and is designed to help IT managers locate and install software patches for ESX Server systems and the Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) running on them. Update Manager (UM) runs as a plugin for VC25, but it is not installed automatically, so a VMware […]

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Today real time replication specialist Neverfail began beta testing of ClusterProtector, which provides real-time data replication over a WAN for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server systems running under Microsoft Cluster Server. Andrew Barnes, Neverfail senior vice president of corporate development, told The Hypervisor that the disaster recovery suite should be ready for production environments by […]

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We’ve heard reports of one user that is seeing a 50x reduction in the amount of storage space needed for backups of their virtual machines thanks to data de-deplication, or dedupe, technology from DataDomain. In this case the DataDomain dedupe tool was integrated with Vizioncore vRanger Pro backup software, so the user simply needs to […]

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Judging by some of the virtual machine (VM) management tools we evaluated recently, server backup software could soon be replaced by server replication tools. The trouble with backups is they spend most of their life archived on some tape or disk storage system. Even if you test the tape as soon as you’ve made it, […]

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While Microsoft is preparing to launch Windows Server 2008 I’m left wondering about licensing the new software. Let’s hope that the license management tools are an improvement on those in Windows Server 2003. Recently I heard about a firm using Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services that had run into a nasty problem. Messages were popping […]

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