Planet vSphere-land

The ballots have been counted and the 2013 vEXPERTS were announced in a VMTN blog post by John Troyer.  I was fortunate enough to be awarded this honorable designation for a fifth consecutive year (I’m going to link that Five Timers club skit from SNL because I still get a laugh out of it).  What’s interesting about this journey for me is that for quite a while I had worked in a...

Heads up to any locals looking for server grade vSphere hardware infrastructure.  I’ve been doing some lab spring cleaning the past few weeks and after some consolidation efforts, I’ve got some hardware available that’s not being put to good use any longer.  All of these are 64-bit and will run vSphere.  All have Ethernet and/or Fibre Channel options. 2x HP DL385 (1x AMD ...

I’m not promoting this on Twitter – Let’s see who actually reads my blog on a Monday morning or at least still employs RSS technology. A short while ago, I received on my doorstep a copy of Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 5.  I’ve already got my own copy and I’d like to make sure this book ends up in the hands of someoneone who: A) needs a copy B) wil...

Not so long ago, VMware product releases were staggered.  Major versions of vSphere would launch at or shortly after VMworld in the fall, and all other products such as SRM, View, vCloud Director, etc. would rev on some other random schedule.  This was extremely frustrating for a vEvangelist because we wanted to be on the latest and greatest platform but lack of compatibility with the remainin...

Those who manage VMware View currently or have used it in the past may be familiar with desktop customization which is required to provide a unique identity on the network for each View Composer VDI session in a pool.  If you’ve got a pretty good Microsoft background, you’re probably already familiar with Sysprep – Microsoft’s tool for customizing Windows server and desk...

Expendable news item here only worthy of a Friday post.  For those who may have missed it, VMware has released an update to the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 5.1 appliance formally referred to as Patch 1.  This release is documented in VMware KB 2044135 and the updated appliance bits can be downloaded here.  Log in, choose the VMware vSphere link, then the Drivers & Tools tab. Patch ...

Regardless of what the vSphere host Advanced Setting Disk.MaxLUN has stated as its definition for years, “Maximum number of LUNs per target scanned for” is technically not correct.  In fact, it’s quite misleading. The true definition looks similar stated in English but carries quite a different meaning and it can be found in my SnagIt hack above or within VMware KB 1998 Defin...

John Troyer (you know him as @jtroyer on Twitter or the guy with the disco ball jacket at social events) has made the announcement that vExpert 2013 applications are now available. Simply put, a vExpert is the formal recognition, by VMware, of being a virtualization rock star.  I haven’t read the latest charter but technically speaking I don’t think one even needs to specifically be...

Publication Date: March 25, 2013 | ISBN-10: 1118407911 | ISBN-13: 978-1118407912 | Edition: 2 The big splash was officially made yesterday but I’m following up with my announcement a day later to help spread the message to anyone who may have been heads down and missed it.  Forbes Guthrie ( ), Scott Lowe ( ), and Kendrick Coleman ( ) have teamed up to produce VMware vSphere Design 2nd Ed...

Here’s a discussion that has somewhat come full circle for me and could prove to be a handy for those with lab or production environments alike. A little over a week ago I was having lunch with a former colleague and naturally a TPS discussion broke out.  We talked about how it worked and how effective it was with small memory pages (4KB in size) as well as large memory pages (2MB in size...

He’s Laverick by name, Maverick by nature (and if I might add, a very cool chap and my friend) – Mike Laverick, formerly of RTFM Education of which I was a LONG time reader going back to my Windows and Citrix days, now has a blog cleverly and conveniently situated at mikelaverick.com.  Since Mike joined forces with VMware, he’s been focused on vCloud evangelism and recently vi...

This free vSphere management handheld app crossed my desk by way of its author Timothé Poznanski back on February 23rd.  I don’t have an Android based device myself to test but those who do should feel free to check this out and let Timothé and/or myself what you think.       From Google Play: Description vCLIDROID is all about Command Line Interface for VMware ESXi. vSp...

Publication Date: August 30, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0321832213 | ISBN-13: 978-0321832214 | Edition: 1 I’m long overdue on book reviews and I need to start off with an apology to the authors for getting this one out so late.  The title is VMware vSphere 5 Building a Virtual Datacenter by Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier (Foreword by Chad Sakac and Technical Editor Tom Keegan).  This i...

Speaking for myself, it’s hard to believe that just a little over 2 years ago in October 2010, many were rejoicing the GA release of vSphere 4.1 and its awesome new features and added scalability.  It seems so long ago.  The following February 2011, Update 1 for vSphere 4.1 was launched and I celebrated my one year anniversary as a VCDX certificate holder.  Now two years later, 5.0 and ...

I talk with a lot of customers including those confined to vSphere, storage, and general datacenter management roles.  The IT footprint size varies quite a bit between discussions as does the level of experience across technologies. However, one particular topic seems to come up at regular intervals when talking vSphere and storage: Thin Provisioning – where exactly is the right place for...

While running Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress on vSphere 5 VMs in the lab, tests were failing about mid way through initializing its several TBs of databases.  This was a real head scratcher.  Symptoms were unwritable storage or lack of storage capacity.  Troubleshooting yielding errors such as “Cannot allocate memory”.  After some tail chasing, the road eventually lead to VM...

VMworld 2012 is underway in San Francisco.  Once again, a record number of attendees is expected to gather at the Moscone Center to see what VMware and their partners are announcing.  From a VMware perspective, there is plenty. Given the sheer quantity of announcements, I’m actually going to break up them up into a few parts, this post being Part I.  Let’s start with the release o...

1.  Make sure you purchase the correct replacement lock at your home improvement store.  This one looks like a match.   2.  Before removing the old lock or installing the new lock, insert the long door handle screw in the door.  Now it is safe to remove the two mounting screws located on the face of the lock.   3.  Failure to perform step #2 above allows gravity to cause the loc...

One of the benefits of working for Dell Compellent is having the privilege to collaborate with some very smart people who are subject matter experts in areas of technology I don’t get as much time to spend time on as I’d like to.  I get to share information with team members about vSphere, as well as Exchange, SQL, *nix, Oracle, and you might have guessed it… Microsoft Windows...

Press Release StarWind Solutions Become Available Through a Leading Canadian Web Hosting Company Burlington, MA – 6 August 2012 – StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of storage virtualization software and VM backup technology, announced today a new partnership agreement with Cirrus Tech Ltd., a Canadian web hosting company specializing in VPS, VM and cloud hosting services. Co...

The other night I upgraded the VMware View 5.0.1 environment in the lab to 5.1 which was released on May 16th.  Normally when I upgrade the View environment, I don’t actually perform an inline upgrade of the Connection Server or database.  The environment is small enough that I can flatten it and rebuild fresh from scratch (including brand new VMs for the infrastructure components such a...

Last fall at the VMworld book store in Las Vegas, I picked up sample chapter 6 ALUA from Mostafa Khalil‘s (@MostafaVMW) upcoming book “Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0“.  The level of detail looked fantastic and I could hardly wait for the rest of the book to be released. Fast forward to a month ago, nearing completion I joked with Mostafa that perhaps VCDXs c...

Last February at VMware Partner Exchange (PEX), I sat the VCAP5-DCD BETA exam.  I detailed that experience here.  The exam consisted of 130 questions to be answered in 225 minutes.  I squandered a lot of time in deep thought on some questions and also spent time providing feedback on many of the questions.  I was fairly comfortable with the content but based on the time I spent on each quest...

Quick VAAI tip as we head into the weekend.  This showed up unexpectedly in lab testing – If you’ve built a new ESXi 5.0 host or cluster of hosts and the VAAI copy offload (XCOPY) primitive isn’t working as expected with Storage vMotion, among other things, verify the Hostname in the DNS Configuration via the DCUI that you’ve named the hosts properly as opposed to leavin...

Hola! Yo Soy Dora!  I hope you are having a great week and for those in the US, I hope your 4th of July holiday was fun and relaxing. Here’s another “how to” for those not real familiar with Linux when standing up a vCloud Director infrastructure.  If you’re following the documentation, you’ll notice on page 13 of the vCloud Director Installation and Configuration...