Planet vSphere-land

I hope many of you read my recent post: Myth Busting: Storage Guarantees wherein I raised questions around the storage savings guarantee from EMC. The basic question is how can they deliver greater storage savings with fewer technical capabilities and use cases than what is available from NetApp. I believe this is a fair question and was hoping for some information sharing.Now I don't expect mos...

I recently saw an interesting question on the VMTN developers forum asking about vSphere SDK for Perl and VUM API integrations. As it stands today, VMware has not publicly exposed or documented the VMware Update Manager APIs, though they have released a few PowerCLI VUM cmdlets for PowerCLI users. This is one feature, in my opinion, that PowerCLI has over the other vSphere SDKs. This is quite un...

NetApp is providing a discount for the purchase of a full conference pass for individuals attending either VMworld in San Francisco or VMworld in Copenhagen. The NetApp discount reduces the price from $1745 to $1495 (USD) and € 1150 to € 950 (Euro).You should also be aware of additional discount rates available from VMware for VMworld Alumni, students and faculty (aka educational rate), gove...

One of the best parts of attending VMworld is the wealth of information shared in breakout sessions, hands-on labs, and in vendor booths. This year NetApp is making our vExperts and subject matter experts available for one-on-one meetings and/or demos for attendees of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco!We expect these spots to go quick so if you're interested discussing the following topics I'd sugge...

Today the Imagine Virtually Anything Alliance (IVA) of Cisco, NetApp, and VMware announced the industry’s first certified end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solution for VMware cloud deployments and virtual infrastructures.This certification is a significant milestone in the evolution and maturation of FCoE and converged 10Gb Ethernet networks. The adoption of this architecture redu...

Hi guys, just a quick post to remind you that the next vBeers will be help this Thursday, August 5th. The last vBeers was great fun, I met a lot of new people so I'm hoping there will be more new faces again this time. This time I must remember to eat something!! When & Where The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke&rsqu...

Check out the latest update to ghettoVCB which now support backup logs to be emailed upon competition. This feature is in experimental support and require the availability of nc (netcat) utility which is included in ESX(i) 4.0+. One can utilize netcat for variety of networking tasks, including communicating to an email server. The reason this feature is in experimental support is it may not be c...

If you are attending VMworld Developers Day 2010, come by and check out the presentation I will be giving alongside the security and virtualization expert, Edward Haletky.Our presentation is entitled: vGhetto - Communities Building Great Solutions (PPC-07) Level: AdvancedDescription: The vSphere APIs offer a very rich interface allowing developers and administrators to create any number of scr...

As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!“, Alan and myself started writing a PowerCLI book. At about the same time Alan got the once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist. Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free! Alan has been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and traveling all over ...

It's an idea that I had for a quite long time, and yet I managed to get it out in the busiest time of my life. Love it or hate it – it's just for fun, guys!   THE VM CROWD      Episode 1: I'm On Twitter                                                      The VM Crowd – Episode 1: I'm On Twitter. poste...

With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1 it has become even more apparent that the next vSphere release will only have an ESXi version. This isn’t world shocking news since VMware had announce this... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

SPEC has diligently working on an industry standard version of VMmark since something like 2006. The first version of their product is complete and was released during my recent holiday. I have been talking with colleagues and customers about SPECvirt for years and would like to talk about what SPECvirt is and what it is not. VMmark is clearly the reigning king of consolidation benchmarks and ...

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has introduced Multicore Virtual CPU technology to its bare metal flagship hypervisor.  This is an interesting feature which had already existed in current versions of VMware Workstation.  VMware has consistently baked in new features in its Type 2 hypervisor products, such as Workstation, Player, Fusion, etc., more or less as a functionality/stabili...

One of the new features that came with vSphere 4.1 was the ability to use Active Directory Authentication on ESX(i) servers for permissions, console access and ssh access.This is a great feature that you will probably want to activate on all your ESX(i) servers. Unfortunately this new feature is not available in PowerCLI 4.1. That means you can’t set this up in your configuration scripts t...

During a recent trip, I decided to use GoGo Inflight Internet aboard a Delta Airlines flight.  I’ve only used the service once before and that is merely because the service typically isn’t offered on the flights I am on.  Both the reliability and latency of service far exceeded my expectations.  I used the service for a little over three hours and lost only 77 frames:  Ping st...

As we announced in our post "We're writing a book!", Luc and myself started writing a PowerCLI book. At about the same time I got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist, how could I turn that down ! Now you don't become a vSpecialist for free, I have been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and travell...

Are you stuck trying to figure out how to convince management into sending you to VMworld?  A justification template has been made available on the VMworld website.  Download.  Fill in the blanks.  Submit to management. Direct link to the letter (MS Word format) Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist Learn how to utilize VMware so you can save your company money this year f...

While doing some testing on ghettoVCB earlier this week, I noticed a new command line argument to vmkfstools utility called "--fix" in vSphere 4.1. From the man pages for vmkfstool, it states the following:-x, --fix -[check|repair]This option will check and/or repair the virtual disk in case of an unclean shutdown.Here is an example of running the command against a VM's VMDK:[root@esx4-1 ~]# vmk...

Recently at the London VMware User Group I gave an additional presentation on top of the normal PowerCLI session I normally provide (which was interactive this time and I think worked very well). The subject of this session was “Why EMC for VMware”, I have had a number of questions from people who know that I have joined EMC and I wanted to address these and show exactly wha...

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&#...

I was contacted awhile back ago by Alain Spineux, about his MKBackup utility and he was in the very early stages of integrating the software with my ghettoVCB script. Per Alain's website:MKBackup is a free front-end for common backup tools like MS Windows ntbackup, and it successor wbadmin, Un*x tools like tar, but also popular ghettoVCB to backup Virtual Machine on VMware ESX(i) host. M...

Check out the latest update to both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCBg2, which now supports vSphere 4.1! There are no new features introduced with these updates but ghettoVCB does include additional logging and debugging functionality to help identify issues that may arise. Unfortunately, with ghettoVCBg2 I had to perform some additional code changes due to undocumented changes in vMA's vi-fastpass Perl l...

I recently wrote an article about vMA 4.1 and Active Directory Integration and today I noticed there were some confusion on the expected behavior of the two types of authentication policy: vi-fastpass authentication versus Active Directory authentication. There are actually a few things to consider:What user context are you trying to execute a command against a target?What authentication policy ...

For those that use VMware's vMA vi-fastpass authentication (vifpinit which is now vifptarget) which allows a user to perform an operation on an ESX(i) or vCenter host without having to provide credentials each time, may notice a change with the resxtop command. In vMA 4.0, if you initialized a fastpass target you could run resxtop against the host without having to provide additional credentials...

The latest release of vMA 4.1 now supports Active Directory integration which can be used to centralize all authentication within a Windows environment. To join a vMA host to your Active Directory domain, you just need to use one simple command called domainjoin-cli which is part of Likewise's "Open" product. Here is an example of vMA host joining an AD domain:By default, Likewise "Open" is conf...