Planet vSphere-land

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...

When working on a design in which there would be two physical datacenters, I started to rethink about why I would create multiple datacenters inside vCenter Server. I noticed that almost all example designs I look at that cover two physical datacenters, also have two datacenters in the vCenter Server design. But why? When searching for an answer in the vSphere 5.1 documentation, the only reason...

Shortly after the release of vCenter 5.1, VMware released “vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0″. With this product you as an administrator are able to manage third party hypervisors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V from within your vCenter installment. This will give companies more flexibility over what hypervisors they are able to use and thus use the hypervisor they need [...] Leav...

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...

VMGuru used to run on an “ESXi only” install with no extra management. It’s a single server in a data center in Amsterdam, so there never was a need for a vCenter Server. When the VMware Octopus Beta started in which we participated, the deployment of the Octopus appliance required a vCenter server. So, instead [...]

At VMworld 2012 VMware announced the newest version of vSphere, version 5.1. Today this new version is finally available! So, in DOLBY DIGITAL available NOW You can download VMware vSphere 5.1 from the VMware download site. If you’re wondering what’s new in vSphere 5.1, check out Alex’s article from August 27th. One of the major [...] by Erik Scholten

With the announcement of vSphere 5.1 at VMworld yesterday some more detailed information is becoming available around the new storage features included in vSphere 5.1.There are some really great stuff on this list that has not gotten much notice yet. I really like that many of these features are now supported in both View and vCloud director. VMFS file sharing limits – The previous limit ...

Tucked in the back pocket with all the other big announcements today at VMworld is the availability of vSphere Replication as a standalone option. It is no longer tied to SRM 5.0 as it was originally made available. This is probably to line up with the FUD that Microsoft has been pushing with their Hyper-V replica being free. What this means is that small shops will have a way to protect their v...

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...

    Today VMware announced a whole list of new major releases of their product portfolio. A few big features up front? How about these: No more vRAM limits, vRAM = GONE vMotion without shared storage the MonsterVM got even stronger, going for 64 vCPU’s, 1 TB of RAM and more than 1.000.000 IOPS per [...] by Alex Muetstege

I have worked with a bunch of customers over the last couple of years and there has been a very common theme. The overwhelming majority of IT shops have not invested in any tools to help them manage and monitor their VMware environments. Sure they have vCenter and you can get some great info out of it, but unless something is going really wrong or has already you might not have a clue. You are e...

Something that was slipped into vCloud 1.5 that did not get much press was the idea on an elastic vDC. This gives the ability to add extra capacity to the underlying provider vDC in vCloud. If you have worked with vCloud before you might be saying wait I could always do this by expanding the size of my cluster or pool that was providing the resources. And this was certainly one option for adding...

I wrote this last year but never published, working on clearing out some old posts. Along with the long list of other features added to vSphere 5, VMware has included a new version of VMFS. The upgrade in VMFS brings us to version 5 of the file system. The main focus of VMware while creating VMFS seems to be making it easier to manage storage in virtual environments. In VMFS-5 the number of stor...

Scripters believe in efficiency, automation, working smarter and not harder, etc.  You’ll sometimes hear them say something like “Any process which is repeated once or more should be scripted”.  Myself, I am not the world’s greatest scripter.  I have to work at it.  Thus my personal threshold for committing to a scripted method is higher than one repetition. In my env...

One of the things that has been on my to do list for a very long time was to check out the vCenter Appliance. I finally found the time to install the vCenter appliance in my own lab and fool around with it. This post is a mix between my findings and some kind of [...] by Anne Jan Elsinga

The way things work out, I tend to build a lot of vCenter Servers in the lab.  Or at least it feels like I do.  I need to test this.  A customer I’m meeting with wants to specifically see that.  I need don’t want to taint or impact an existing vCenter Server which may already be dedicated to something else having more importance.  VMware Site Recovery Manager is a good example.�...

In my vSphere lab environment I like to try and run things as closely as possible to how it would be run in the “real world”.  Of course this isn’t always possible due to hardware and budget limitations although there are a few things I can do such as running a dedicated database (DB) server VM(s) from which to run the different vSphere related DB instances, such as vCenter, Update Man...

The VMware View 5.0 environment in the lab has been running well and has proven itself as an extremely reliable remote access replacement for the old Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 solution I had in the past.  However, in an effort to address a licensing issue related to the View App for iPad demo environment, I managed to force both a pool and a single desktop from within that pool into a perp...

With 2011 wrapped up and the holiday festivities over with, I decided to kick off 2012 by sitting a few new VMware certification exams.  Before I get into the details of the exam experience, I must extend my sincere appreciation to the new testing center I tried out – New Horizons Computer Learning Center in Eagan, MN.  It’s a new facility, friendly staff, state of the art equipmen...

In the past couple of weeks I have spent some time with VMware vCloud Director 1.5.  The experience yielded three blog articles Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director, Expanding vCloud Director Transfer Server Storage and now this one. In this round, the vCD cell stopped working properly (single cell server environment).  I could log into the vCD provider and organization...

As I sit here working on an SRM lab, VUM just sent an email to me reporting 28 new patches for ESX(i) 4.1 including the release of 4.1 Update 2. What’s New The VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Update 2 release offers the following improvements: Support for new processors: vCenter Server 4.1 Update 2 supports hosts with processors on AMD Opteron 6200 series (Interlagos) and AMD Opteron 4200 serie...

This important notice just came across my radar: VMware has become aware of some ESXi 4.0 hosts experiencing a purple screen after vCenter Server is upgraded to 5.0 The Knowledgebase Team has prepared KB article: ESXi 4.0 Update 2 hosts may experience a purple screen after vCenter Server is upgraded to 5.0 (2007269) and an alert has been placed on the Support page to alert customers of this is...

I stumbled across this while rummaging through the vSphere 5.0 Installation and Setup document.  Page 183 contains a small section (new in vSphere 5.0) which describes a process to enable database monitoring for Microsoft SQL Server (surrounding pages discuss enabling the same for other supported database platforms).  The SQL script provided in the documentation contains an error on the first ...

After the release on July 12th, you can now download VMware vSphere 5 and enjoy the 150 new features. You can find the downloads here. For more information visit: VMware ESXi and VMware ESX Info Center VMware vSphere 5 release notes. If you want to upgrade your existing VMware vSphere installation, check out my previous [...] by Erik Scholten

It’s that time again (to bring up the age old topic of Microsoft SQL database permission requirements in order to install VMware vCenter Server).  This brief article focuses on vCenter 5.0.  Permissions on the SQL side haven’t changed at all based on what was required in vSphere 4.  However, the error displayed for lacking required permissions to the MSDB System database has.  In...