Planet vSphere-land

This a response to Gabrie van Zanten’s question – Design question: Why vCenter Server Datacenter? To summarize, Gabe argues that the datacenter object in vCenter creates artificial limits on his operational abilities and asks why he shouldn’t just use folder objects across sites. Gabe postulates that perhaps the default for our designs should be to avoid multiple datacenter obj...

I’m delighted to reveal that the new version of the VMware vSphere Design book is now available from leading book stores.        The electronic versions are widely available now, and hard copies can be pre-ordered and should ship within the next couple of weeks. Scott Lowe (blog/twitter) and I worked hard to include all the vSphere 5.x changes in this edition. Quoting from th...

This week I sat VMware’s VCAP5-DCD exam (and I’m proud to say I passed). As many have commented before me, time is real constraint (or is that a risk). I won’t list out the resources I used to prepare for it; suffice it to say that Gregg Robertson has an excellent post that covers this. Although I have heard about this fantastic design book out there… Obviously I can...

Now that vSphere 5.1 has been announced, it’s time to update the reference card. Due to another project I’m working on, I won’t have the spare cycles to devote time to this for the next couple of months.  Those of you who attended VMworld and caught the session that Scott Lowe and I presented, will know what I’m talking about. If you don’t know, don’t worry, ...

Following some great feedback from Brandt, Bjorn and Jakk recently in the comments, I’ve created a small update to the reference cards. Thanks guys! As ever, if you spot anything you think needs correcting or new changes that need applied then let us all know.   As usual, you can grab the latest copy over here.

I’ve made a couple of minor corrections to the networking section of the vReference Card: Port groups per vSS = 256 Hosts per vDS = 350 Thanks to FerFables, Daniel M, Rene Reitinger, and Alex for pointing out these two typos! As usual, you can grab the latest copy over here.

At long last, the vSphere 5.0 vReference Card is ready.  Go and grab it over here. This time I’ve split it up into both an A4 version and a separate Letter size one. This should hopefully make the printing experience more consistent regardless of which side of the pond you try. New with this release is a full page version.  This is the same information as the card, but I’ve incre...

I think I might have stumbled across an interesting design conflict. UCS Boot from iSCSI SAN support Cisco UCS manager 2.0  now offers the ability for their blade servers to boot from iSCSI SAN.  In the release notes it states: iSCSI Boot - iSCSI boot enables a server to boot its operating system from an iSCSI target machine located remotely over a network. Sounds good to me. I know a lot o...

Here’s a preview of the Storage section from the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card. This is the last section I plan to include, so I hope to get a full beta of the card out in the next week or so.  Formatting can be onerous and usually takes longer than I expect, but it’s not too far off.  I laid it all out last week, but it takes up about 50% more real estate than 2 sides of A4/L...

Background VMware have recommended for quite some time that we stick to multicast when configuring NLB (MS’s Network Load Balancing) where possible: VMware recommends that you use multicast mode, because unicast mode forces the physical switches on the LAN to broadcast all Network Load Balancing traffic to every machine on the LAN. If you need to use unicast, then to prevent port flooding ...

Here’s a preview of the Host section for ESXi 5 from the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card. I’d love to hear your feedback on the section’s content, as I’m likely to drop anything I can’t be sure is absolutely correct. Anything still in grey are areas I’ve not been able to confirm are still valid with vSphere 5. Just drop your comments below or catch me on tw...

Here’s a preview of the Install section for ESXi 5 from the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card. I’ve gone fairly heavy on the Image Builder and Auto Deploy areas. Probably much more than they deserve in relation to their importance, but they are new and generally less understood so I thought I’d start in verbose mode.  I can always pair it down before the section makes it into...

I’ve been working away on both the ESXi Host and ESXi Install sections for the vReference card, and I came across something I found interesting about the all new Auto Deploy tool. Here’s a quote from the penultimate paragraph on Page 68 of the current Installation and Setup Guide PDF for vSphere 5: If the vCenter Server system is unavailable, the host contacts the Auto Deploy server ...

Here is another preview of the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card – the vCenter section.  I’d love to hear your feedback, as I’m likely to drop anything I can’t be sure is absolutely correct. Anything still in grey are areas I’ve not been able to confirm that they are still valid with vCenter 5. Just drop your comments below or catch me on twitter (@forbesguthrie)....

Here is another preview of the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card – the VM section. There are several areas that I’ve shaded in grey as I’ve not been able to confirm that they are still valid with vSphere 5 VMs. I’d love to hear your feedback, as I’m likely to drop anything I can’t be sure is absolutely correct or just not relevant enough anymore. Just drop y...

Here is a third preview of the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card – the availability section. As HA has been re-written (AAM > FDM), this section has quite a lot of new content over the vSphere 4 card – I’d love to hear any of your feedback. As before, the green text identifies bits that I’ve not been able to confirm yet.  Unfortunately, I suspect that the MSCS stuff ...

Here is another preview of the vSphere 5 vReference Card – the resources section.  I’d love to hear any of your feedback.  Just drop your comments below or catch me on twitter (@forbesguthrie). Click on the image to see it full size, or you can view/print it as a PDF. ===== vSphere 5 vReference card – resources section originally posted by Forbes Guthrie on vReference. Sub...

Here is the first preview of the vSphere 5 vReference Card – the networking section.  I’d love to hear any of your feedback. Just drop your comments below or catch me on twitter (@forbesguthrie). Click on the images to see them full size, or you can view/print it as a PDF. and   ===== vSphere 5 vReference card – networking section originally posted by Forbes Guthrie on...

I received a great suggestion from @FarooqPSK on Twitter this morning: Would’ve been great if you could’ve included epub/mobi format for the vsphere 5 documentation notes. Please consider this. So after an hour of wrestling with the notes in Calibre, I managed to create a version in MOBI (for Kindle users) and EPUB (for everything else).  I can’t guarantee they will be perfect...

You’ll be glad to hear that I’m in the process of collating information for a new vSphere 5 Reference Card. I’ll release sections for everyone to peruse as soon as they’re ready as I’ll be eager for feedback before I roll them into the first full release. I like the Mantra of “release early, release often”.  Be sure to follow me on Twitter (@forbesguthrie) to be the first ...

This afternoon I attended the #VSP2384 session – Distributed Datacenters with Multiple vCenters Deployments Best Practises.  I didn’t take notes as I quickly got absorbed by this excellent presentation.  I’m already looking forward to downloading the video of this as soon as its uploaded to the VMworld website and watching it again. However, as a brief abstract here is some o...

VMware has announced that VMworld 2012 US will be at the Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco.  The VMworld 2012 conference will run 27th August through to the 30th August 2012. Update: VMworld Europe 2012 will be in Barcelona on 16-18 October 2012.   ===== VMworld 2012 dates and location originally posted by Forbes Guthrie on vReference. Subscribe to my RSS feed for all the lat...

I attended Intel’s #SPO3040 earlier this afternoon – Best Practises for Deploying VMware vSphere 5.0 Using 10GbE.  It was an interesting session with lots of good material.  Here are 3 short little titbits that I tweeted about that I thought might useful to record here: Intel said we will start to see 10GBASE-T on server boards very soon. This allows WoL (Wake-on-LAN) and OOB (...

Along with today’s release of vSphere 5, VMware has published the vSphere 5 documentation: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html In addition to the online html library and the downloadable PDFs, there are now e-book versions to grab.  There are MOBI files for your kindle and EPUB files for most other e-book readers.  I’ve requested this for some ...

I thought I’d post up a full listing of the esxcli command from vSphere 5.  It’s as much for my own future reference, but as 5.0 still isn’t GA I thought there are probably other folk who’d like to take a look through all the options. Although the esxcli command was around before vSphere 5.0, it has been propelled into the spotlight with the news that esxcli will be the ...