Planet vSphere-land

I encountered this last week and was not find any reference to my specific problem – so I am documenting it here. I was trying to remove the Cisco Nexus 1000V VEM from the ESXi hosts in my lab. This was the error I was getting. This is what I had from the esxupdate.log file 2013-01-24T08:35:32Z esxupdate: LiveImageInstaller: DEBUG: Starting to live remove VIBs: Cisco_bootbank_cisco-vem-v147-e...

I hope everybody out there in the virtualization world is having a great holiday season this year! My religion celebrates Christmas, and these are four things I’d love to see under my Christmas tree this year. 1. IPv6 support at all levels of the VMware stack. For a cloud vendor that fancies themselves as forward-looking, not to mention trying to be the “VMware of Networking,” ...

In April of this year I finally was able to take the “VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud“ course lead by  Mr. Eric Sloof himself. The training was based on vCloud Director 1.5 and I learned quite a lot and really thought I had this vCloud networking thing in my fingers. The exercises in class where easy to complete and made sense to me. Ok, Ok, I do admit I was somet...

In the previous articles we created a Datacenter, a cluster and added hosts to it. Now that we have done that we can start finalizing the configuration. This is just one example out of the many ways to configure networking for an ESXi host, and I kept it really really simple. This is not following any best practices, I just wanted to show some of the steps. In this scenario I have 4 network card...

I already shared this video through twitter, but I love it so much I figured I would blog it as well. In this video VXLAN is explained in clear understandable language in just four minutes. We need more videos like these, fast and easy to digest! "Understanding VXLAN and the value prop in just 4 minutes…" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Av...

I have spent a great deal of time lately working with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This computing platform is really quite impressive with its power and flexibility, but my expectations about the platform have really changed since I completed the UCS training. During the training classes that I attended, both the design and install courses emphasized that the Cisco UCS platform woul...

Speaking with customers everyday the most common thing I see the infrastructure teams struggle with is how do we get from X to Z. We are virtualizing first. Evaluating tier 1 apps as VM’s. Migrating non-essential services to the cloud. As an overall strategy how do I get from what I have, to where I want to go? While there are many topics to get you going on this path, from management and ...

Been fighting some problems with VMware Auto Deploy lately which turned out to be an easy to solve issue. I installed the first host in the cluster, which would NOT be deployed with Auto Deploy but had a local hard disk in it. Configured it the way I like it, set all the logging and network coredump location to be the vCenter host and then created a host profile. The network configuration consis...

Don’t’ you just love double titles? For many years I have been an infrastructure guy. I really liked how the cables, and processors and Memory and blinking lights worked. Applications were often the necessary evil tolerated so that I can play with cool technology. During my own journey toward learning about the cloud it becomes increasingly important to consider the function of the ...

A hot summer afternoon about 10 years ago is when I first met a few folks at CDS (Computer Data Source), in a small conference room, the guys wanted to make a difference, do something great to expand the business, they were so passionate about what they did for living. In my mind I was thinking what would it take me to get a job here……. Fast forward a few days and I found myself working ther...

This week a colleague of mine asked me to help out with a customer’s network design in his VMware environment.  I have long possessed the kind of socratic wisdom that allows me to recognize my ignorance.  And I have either the confidence of the foolishness to boldly announce here that I am a networking ignoramus.  But the journey to enlightenment starts with one step. I started my resea...

Wow, where has the time gone? It seems like it was just yesterday that I was dabbling with VMware GSX to give some extra workstations to application developers, that was over 7 years ago. Now I’m working for a Fortune 500 company doing what I love more than anything, talking about wickedly cool stuff! 2010 has been an amazing ride, probably the best year of my life and it’s just the ...

[printprofile] I just recently updated my VMware Workstation software on my UBER-Workstation to 7.1.2 build-301548. The next time I fired up my lab I noticed I was unable to connect to any of my VM’s via my workstation. After making sure firewalls, listeners, and all other possible culprits were not the issue; I finally realized that something had happened with the Workstation upgrade. My ...

Last week I took my first vacation in a year and a half.  I had not missed a single day of work in 18 months.  So last week, when I was galavanting through Spain and running terrified, screaming, and covered in sangria through the streets of Pamplona, VMware made its biggest announcement in over a year: the launch of vSphere 4.1.  My old team put out what looks to be a wonderful “What&#...