As Published on VmwareInfo.com:

It’s a pretty solid best practice to create a separate virtual disk or VMDK/VHD for each volume in a virtual machine.  The alternative is to create 1 vDisk and then partition the drives within it.   Single volumes per virtual hard drive allow for much easier management in my opinion.  Growing, shrinking and otherwise manipulating a single volume when it is 100% of the virtual disk becomes a trivial thing with most hypervisors.  Situations where a single virtual disk is partitioned to multiple volumes and manipulating the first partition on the disk, becomes an exercise in data block juggling.  Sometimes preventing the operation from occurring at all.  Of course for new VMs, I still tend to favor a single partition approach but when multiple partitions are in play, separate virtual disks are the way to go.

From within the Windows’ Disk Manager/Administrator, multiple VMDK/VHDs will just look like separate Hard Disks within the Operating System.  Hopefully, these Virtual Disks will also be located on a SAN storage LUN somewhere!

One of the new features of Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 is DirectAccess.  The promise of DirectAccess is the ability for corporate laptops and machines to connect to the corporate LAN seamlessly without the need for a VPN. (Or rather, DirectAccess will be your VPN).  The machine will be connected whenever it is connected to internet access.  All of your internal resources will be available to the client machine whenever it has internet access.  Marcos Velez summarized some of the requirements and challenges clients may face when looking to implement the new Windows DirectAccess feature.

… as with everything that is too good to be true, the requirements [for DirectAccess] are enormous.  I will try to summarize some of those right now:

1. DirectAccess requires Windows 2008 R2
2. DirectAccess requires IPv6
3. DirectAccess clients need a client certificate in order to be able to connect to the network
4. DirectAccess requires deploying a DirectAccess server
5. DirectAccess STILL requires users to log in, but
6. DirectAccess client laptops (or computers) are ALWAYS connected to the corporate network (even before the user has logged on)

By the way, DirectAccess is a very cool idea, and it really is worth considering, but the list of pre-requisites is long.  Daunting, even.  DirectAccess requires a large investment (of time and money) by clients into technologies that they might not be able (or willing) to undertake at this time.  That is a discussion that needs to be taken up with the client, of course.

As published on VMwareInfo.com:

Chad Sakac, EMC RockStar extraordinaire, is helping to launch a new VMware focused portal site at EMC.com and is hoping everyone out there will stop by and check it out.  The “Everything VMware at EMC” site is www.emc.com/vmwarecommunity.  This community is open to everyone and will give you access to the EMC vSpecialists, forums, discussion groups, events and other relevant Virtualization information EMC is hard at work creating. 

Of course you can also check out Chad’s Blog @ Virtual Geek or follow his Tweets @ Twitter.com/sakacc.

Originally Published on VMwareInfo.com