Planet vSphere-land

I’ll be taking a free web-cast on the EMC VNX Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) today (Thursday 11th August 2011) in which I will demonstrate how to quickly and easily get the EMC VNX VSA up and running in your own work or home VMware vSphere lab environment.  For good measure I’ll also be covering, and demonstrating, how to install and use the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) Uni...

Here’s a really quick post to show you how to enable or disable SSH connectivity on an ESXi 5 host from within the vSphere Client.  Please note, you can do the same on an ESXi 4.1 host.  Of course you can also do this from the console of the ESXi host but for most using the vSphere Client this is a far more convenient method. First of all from within the vSphere Client select the ...

What a crazy couple of months it’s been at work!   You can probably tell from the lack of blog posts on the site that I have been busy doing other things, namely working with a small group of others from the EMC vSpecialist team to create a VMworld EMC hands on lab offering for the upcoming VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen.  Plenty of hard work and brain power has g...

Those of you that have bought an HP Proliant Microserver for your work or home VMware vSphere lab are probably wondering whether it will work with VMware vSphere 5.0?  Well, the good news is that it does and that even the installation  process goes through without a hitch both to local internal USB pen drive or local disk.  I have tested this with the final RTM version of vSphe...

Those masters of VMware vSphere HA and DRS Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman have been at it again and have just released another deep-dive vSphere book this time on ‘VMware vSphere 5 Clustering – Technical Deepdive’.  It covers the topics of HA and DRS as found in their previous book along with a multitude of other new topic areas following areas (and anything else with a two or th...

After much anticipation VMware vSphere 5.0 has now officially been announced with a release date in the not so distant future (still TBC).  It is safe to say that this is definitely one of the most significant vSphere/ESX/ESXi updates to date with a whole range of feature improvements, enhancements and all new capabilities.  In fact it is VMware’s largest co-ordinated release of products ...

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No doubt by now you would have heard about VMware’s much publicized July 12th online live event (starts 9:00AM Pacific Time) where it is rumoured that some significant VMware announcements will be made.  When an event such as this has a title such as “Cloud Infrastructure Takes A Major Step Forward” and is hosted by VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz and CTO, Steve Herrod you know that wh...

,In vChat #18, Eric, David & I discuss using Twitter at Mt Everest basecamp, the new Iomega PX4, HP Discover, HP TouchPad, Uber EMC VNX VSA, the Denver VMUG, the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Launch Event (July 12), VMware vExpert program, VMworld 2011, and new TrainSignal VCA-DT and Security products. vChat is a regular virtualization video chat covering VMware vSphere, Cloud Computing...

Research and advisory firm Gartner have released the latest update to their x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure ‘Magic Quadrant’ report.  This ‘Magic Quadrant’ provides a graphical representation of the x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure market for a period of time that the report covers along with a written commentary.  It looks at the particular industry and provid...

Occasionally you may want to clear out the list of tasks from the ‘Recent Tasks’ section of your vSphere Client.  The tasks listed will disappear after a period of time but sometimes you may want to remove them then and there, for example: if wanting to take a nice clean screen grab of the VMware vSphere Client interface for a guide or document you may be working on. The easiest way ...

The VMware vExpert 2011 notification emails were sent out yesterday (Friday) and I’m very pleased to announce that VMware considered me worthy of receiving the vExpert title for a third year in a row!  This is much appreciated as it is nice to receive this nod of approval from VMware and of course my much valued readers of TechHead, so a massive thanks to the VMware selection committee...

The good folks over at Iomega have agreed to provide TechHead readers (UK only at this stage – watch this space for other countries) with a generous 20% discount off of their new Iomega PX series NAS devices from the 1st July until the 1st September.  I’m a big fan of both the Iomega IX and PX series storage devices as they are ideal for my VMware vSphere lab environment, of course t...

Just a quick post to let you know, if you haven’t already seen, that v1.1.0 of VMware’s vSphere iPad application has been released and is now available for download/update on the Apple App Store.  This update to the iPad app is about bug fixes, providing a few tweaks and adding a handful of minor (though good to have) improvements.  One important point of note is that this new v...

It’s been a little later than I’d hoped in announcing the winners of the TrainSignal ‘Best of vSphere 4.1 for vNerds’ training DVD due to being away on holiday, though I’m back now and it’s time to announce the winners. Hurray! First of all thanks to everyone who made the effort to submit a photo, including Christian (@H0bbel) who sent through a photo and didn’t even want to ent...

With Iomega’s recent release of their exciting new PX series of NAS devices I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on one of these funky new units. I have been a happy Iomega IX4 owner for the past two years and run two of them 24×7 in my home VMware vSphere lab.  In this time the only issue I’ve had is a single disk failure in one of the units which in my view isn’t bad...

It’s almost time for another London VMware Users Group (VMUG) and this next VMUG falls on July 14th (2011).  If you haven’t been to a VMUG then I highly recommend you (work allowing) head along as it is an excellent way of bringing yourself up to speed on developments in the world of VMware and also find out more on various products from VMware partners.  In attending you also g...

Thought I’d pass this on… I just had an internal email through notifying of the EMC Live Webcasts for all things EMC & VMware (with a little Vblock thrown in for good measure) for June 2011.  There are usually some really interesting sessions for EMC and non-EMC customers alike who are looking at or have already started virtualizing, particularly with VMware.  A personal fav...

After many months of on again, off again work Simon Long and myself are pleased to announce… vBeers.org ! We’ve been keen to produce a centralised vBeers site for the virtualization community to come and check and inform others on any vBeers events that they or others may be organised.  If you are wondering “what is vBeers?” then head over to the new vBeers site and check out the...

I’ve been running an Iomega IX4 in my home vSphere lab 24×7 for the past two years and have found it to be a nice reliable NAS device.  Though like with anything regular maintenance is required whether this be removing the dust or fluff from the fan at the back or keeping the firmware up-to-date.  The latter being the topic of this blog post. The Iomega IX2 or IX4 NAS has two...

There has been quite a bit of discussion on a few of my vSphere lab posts around what network cards work (and don’t work) with the various versions of VMware ESX/ESXi.  As such I thought it useful to put together a VMware vSphere Network Card Compatibility Matrix which I will keep populated with the details of those network cards I own and know to work with the various versions of VMwa...

What better way to kick off a Friday than with a competition?  David Davis from Trainsignal has kindly provided two copies of his ‘Best of vSphere 4.1 for vNerds’ training DVD to give away to a couple of lucky TechHead readers.  This training DVD is over 2 hours in length and covers a range of interesting and useful VMware vSphere 4.1 related topics (for a full list see the bott...

Well, I’ve almost missed the boat on trying to gain a vote or two for my sessions at the upcoming VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen later on this year…  I’ve been working with others of the vSpecialist Team on the EMC vLabs for the EMC World 2011 event which ran last week, and wow! What a crazy ride it’s been, long hours, tight deadlines, highs, lows, energy drink and a ...

It’s been a while folks since our last vChat due to busy work schedules but our latest vChat installment is finally here.  In vChat #17 we talk about VMworld submissions, EMC World news, Charlotte regional VMUG streaming, VMware books, new Train Signal videos, Home labs, and, not to be forgotten, iPads (of course). vChat is a regular virtualization video chat covering VMware vSphere...

Here’s an error message that may catch people out who are trying to install VMware vCenter Server 4.1 or when upgrading from vCenter Server 4.0 to v4.1.  It’s pretty basic stuff though I thought it worth a mention for those of you new to installing VMware vSphere and vCenter Server.  The error message is “This installation package is not supported by this processor type”.
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