Planet vSphere-land

Those who follow me on twitter probably have seen me “moaning” about the Dutch VMUG for a long time now. For years the Dutch VMUG was not a VMUG like any other VMUG in the world. Yes we had HUGE event in the Netherland every year with over 700 attendees, but it was a commercial event (my opinion!) and not a User Group event. User groups throughout the world are groups which orga...

Most of you have probably seen the announcement Frank did yesterday… Frank, Cormac, Vaughn and I are working on this book project called “Tweet sized vSphere Design Considerations” and we need YOU, the community, to contribute! What are you saying? You are writing a book and want us to do the work for you? Yes indeed, but this book belongs to all of us! As Frank stated: Th...

For those like me who love reading research papers by developers you might want to head over to labs.vmware.com as today a new version of the VMware Technical Journal was released, the summer 2013 edition. You can download it as a PDF on the website, or you can read the individual articles straight in your web browser. Below you can find the Table of Content, and the titles convinced me tha...

I just received the news that I have sessions accepted for both VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona. Session ID: BCO4872 Speakers: Lee Dilworth, Duncan Epping Session Title: Operating and Architecting a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster based infrastructure Track: Business Continuity Presenting at: San Francisco, Barcelona Session ID: VSVC4569 Speaker: Rick Scherer, William Lam, Duncan Ep...

Just a reminder, if you want your free Kindle copy of the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive or the vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Deepdive, make sure to check Amazon (US Kindle Store) today and tomorrow (Wednesday June the 5th and Thursday June the 6th)! You can download the Kindle copy of both these books for free, yes that is correct ZERO dollars. So make sure you pick it up either before the pro...

Recently Train Signal changed the way they deliver training… Instead of buying a single training every time they changed to a subscription based model. It makes a lot of sense if you ask me. I always liked the Train Signal concept as it allows you to do a training when you have the time, instead of the standard 9 to 5 times. Especially when you need to quickly brush up in a certain ar...

I had a question from a customer last week. He was doing a manual migration on a cluster which had DRS enabled. He was using the vSphere Web Client and was wondering if he should tick the “Allow host selection within this cluster” tickbox or not, as shown in the screen shot below. The customer decided not to tick the “host selection” tickbox and decided that DRS woul...

Do you want a free Kindle copy of the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive or the vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Deepdive? Well make sure to check Amazon next week! I just put both of the books up for a promotional offer… For 48 hours, Wednesday June the 5th and Thursday June the 6th, you can download the Kindle (US Kindle Store) copy of both these books for free, yes that is correct ZERO dollars...

For years these rumors have been floating around that DRS does not take CPU Ready Time (%RDY) in to account when it comes load balancing the virtual infrastructure. Fact is that %RDY has always been a part of the DRS algorithm but not as a first class citizen but as part of CPU Demand, which is a combination of various metrics but includes %RDY. Still, one might ask why %RDY is not a first ...

Lately I have been receiving more and more questions around support for specific “hypervisor side” solutions. With that meaning, how VMware deals with solutions which are installed within the hypervisor. I have always found it very difficult to dig up details around this both externally and internally. I figured it was time to try to make things a bit more clear, if possible at ...

A couple of weeks ago I asked this question on twitter about what the average disk size of a virtual machine is these days. Within a couple of minutes Ben Thomas replied and said we might be able to create a survey script and he copied William Lam in. Now for those who never worked with William, if you ask him a question like that you can expect him to knock something out… William and...

One of the things that many people have asked me is how they could check if their environment was meeting the requirements for an upgrade to 5.1. Until today I never really had a good answer for it but fortunately that has changed. Alan Renouf has spent countless of hours developing a script that validated your environment and assesses if it is ready for an upgrade to vSphere 5.1. This is a...

Every once in a while you see a solution by a startup and you get all excited. AetherStore is one of those type of solutions. The funny thing is that AetherStore is not directly related to my day-to-day job, but I can fully relate to their pitch. So what is AetherStore and who are the folks behind it? AetherStore was founded by three graduates from Scotland’s University of St Andrews...

Last week I had a chat with Rick Braddy from SoftNAS. Some of you might know Rick from when he was the CTO of a hosted virtul desktop company called Virtual-Q and others from when he was the CTO of Citrix for XenApp and XenDesktop. Today Rick is the CTO for SoftNAS, a software and appliance based storage solution. Rick gave me an introduction to what it is SoftNAS (Professional) does and of...

VMworld 2013 Call For Papers opened today. I know many of you are excited about this and hoping to have a session accepted at this top-of-the-bill event. Personally I always submit various sessions and for the last years always had atleast one of them excepted, and some years even multiple. So the obvious question I always get is “do you have tips”? I guess at the risk of loweri...

The top 25 bloggers 2013 voting results are out again. This year the competition was insane. With newcomers like Cormac Hogan and Chris Wahl, but also old-timers like Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Eric Sloof and of course Frank “resource management” Denneman. First of all, a BIG THANK YOU to Eric Siebert who took the time and effort again to set this up. I know how much work these kin...

Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the top virtualization blogs has started again. Of course I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition once again is huge, there are a couple of new-comers which has published some outstanding work. Personally I am a huge fan of...

I have seen this question popping up in multiple places now, vMotion over VXLAN is it supported? I googled it and nothing turned up, so I figured I would write a short statement: In vSphere 5.1 (and earlier) vMotion over VXLAN is not supported. This statement might change in the future, it could be that in the next version vMotion traffic over a VXLAN wire will be supported, but with the cu...

A while back I posted that 5.0 U2 re-introduced the renaming behavior for VM file names. I was just informed by our excellent Support Team that unfortunately the release notes missed something crucial and Storage vMotion does not rename files by default. In order to get the renaming behavior you will have to set an advanced setting within vCenter.. This is how you do it: Go to “Admin...

Today an awesome appliance called the vCenter Support Assistant was made available to the world. I have seen some screenshots and a demo and feel that this appliance is a MUST HAVE for anyone who files Support Requests. Just the fact that you can do that from a single interface, which also allows you to upload the support bundle just makes life a whole lot easier. Ryan Johnson wrote an exc...

For the last months I have people asking me why on earth I was on google talk / messenger in the middle of the night, but then did not respond when they said hi. It appears that my Macbook had been waking up roughly every hour while I had put it to sleep. At first I thought it was the messenger software I was running called Adium. But after closely checking this didn’t seem to be the ...

I had various people asking why I didn’t make it easier to buy my books via my website. Greg Schulz from StorageIOblog.com mentioned that he created an amazon store. So I took a peek at how he set it up and kinda did something similar. If you click “My Bookstore” at the top you will be automatically brought to a custom Amazon store. It will list all my books on the first p...

I have been asked by many if it is possible automating ESXi host level changes without opening SSH. In many organizations people are prohibited to open SSH however they do have the need to make certain changes on a host level. One of those changes for instance is in a stretched cluster environment where “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault” needs to be set to true. This setting can only be con...

I ran in to this error today that the ssl certificate verification failed. Or to be more precise: Failed to connect to VMware Lookup Service. SSL certificate verification failed. I had been playing around in my lab and I am guessing this error was caused by the fact that I changed the hostname of my vCenter Server Appliance after configuring it. When I rebooted the VCVA I bumped in to this...

VMware just published the second VMware Technical Journal. This winter edition contains great publications on topics like vProbes, Paravirtual vRDMA Devices, Cloud Tenant UI design process, Storage DRS and FrobOS. There is also a nice introduction by VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger. Simply to much to mention, I suggest you just download it… I think it is a great read and it gives an ...