Reserving 1 physical CPU core for Unity Connection?

Starting from VMWare ESXi 5.5 and Unity Connection 10.5.2, you no longer need to reserve 1 CPU core for Unity Connection.  Please see the URL and text below:

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Virtualization_for_Cisco_Unity_Connection

Quote:
"VMWare release 5.1 and older, requires reserving one physical core per physical server - see co-residency policy. With VMWare release 5.5 and later and Unity Connection release 10.5.2 and later while utilizing the latency sensitivity feature, you may remove the requirement of dedicated one physical core per physical server. This requires the Unity Connection VM Latency Sensitivity to be set to 'High' while at least one other VMs is set to 'Normal'. Recommend every VM to be set to 'Normal' except for Unity Connection VMs."

UCS Manager + VM-FEX - Not compatible with VMWare vCenter appliance

Just come across an issue during the VM-FEX proof of concept test with customer, I am using UCSM 2.0 and trying to configure VM-FEX with VMWare ESXi 5.0 and vCenter 5.0.  We are using vCenter appliance 5.0, not installing the vCenter on Windows, for this test.  The result is after the integration, all VM can't be powered up.

After a quick search and found this KB:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2004079

UCS Manager with VM-FEX does not support the vCenter Server Appliance in any available release.


After we build a new vCenter on Windows (not appliance), everything is working fine.  :)

Tricks of integrating XenDesktop DDC with VMWare vCenter

My environment:  VMWare vCenter 4.1 on Windows 2008 server, ESXi 4.1, Citrix XenDesktop DDC 4

Citrix XenDesktop is the VDI products from Citrix, and it is flexible that the desktop client VM can run on Citrix XenServer and VMWare ESXi.  You can choose your preferred hypervisor for your client VMs.  In my testing I am using ESXi as the hypervisor for the client VMs. 

Integration is needed between Citrix DDC and VMWare vCenter because you need to know which VMs on your ESXi server hosting the client VMs.  During my integration work I have got the following error message in the Create Desktop Group wizard in DDC:

‘Invalid Address – The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address.’

The workaround is to allow both HTTP and HTTPS for SDK access on vCenter, to do this you can:

1. Edit C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\proxy.xml with your wordpad, and change the access mode of /sdk from httpsWithRedirect to httpAndHttps

<e id="5">
      <_type>vim.ProxyService.LocalServiceSpec</_type>
      <accessMode>httpAndHttps</accessMode>
      <port>8085</port>
      <serverNamespace>/sdk</serverNamespace>
    </e>

2. In DDC, when you are creating integration with vCenter, you can use the URL http://1.2.3.4/sdk where 1.2.3.4 is your vCenter IP address.  You can now allow HTTP access to your vCenter SDK.

Have fun!