Planet vSphere-land

Eric Siebert of vSphere-land, together with David Davis, Simon Seagrave and John Troyer announced the results of the Top 25 blogs election this week. Using vChat is in my opinion a very cool format and I had the feeling that I was watching the academy awards for Bloggers. Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time and effort to create this entertaining show. Next time I will be viewing this from ...

This post is going to do a couple things I don’t like to do. I am going to use myself as an example. I don’t mind sharing experiences or relaying what I care about. But, I find too much public self-reflection is vain and not much value to others. But I don’t know how else to write this without referring to my own personal experience and approach I have taken, unplanned as it was. So I ask ...

Quick (and awesome) invite for Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) and virtualization community members from St. Croix Solutions - this event is being put on TOMORROW Friday October 1st: I’d like to invite any and all members of the VMware User Group to join us on Friday for a breakfast presentation and a movie at the new Showplace Icon movie theater in St Louis Park. St Croix engineer, Bill...

This webinar from VKernel's VKernelUniversity shows you the VM performance metrics you should care about and how they reveal issues that CMS can find and fix.

It came to my attention pretty quick that something was amiss with the last Celerra VSA UBER release. I heard strange stories of disks not adding and the OVA not deploying. Since this thing is drawing close on a couple thousand downloads some environmental, transfer, and operational bugs/errors will cause problems. But I finally nailed this down myself when I was doing my iSCSI testing. I had ru...

If you are in London on the 8th October 2010 then you could be in for a treat, VMware are arranging a fantastic event, well worth the visit and best of all its free ! The event is called: Managing vSphere in large environments using APIs and PowerCLI There are limited spaces available so act now or you will miss out, some of the most fantastic minds of VMware will be gracing Lon...

One of my readers had an issue with a vCD cell not starting correctly. He wanted to know how to monitor the progress of the startup of the daemon. You can do that very easy with the following command: tail -f /opt/vmware/cloud-director/logs/cell.log Now you should see status updates like the following pass by: Application Initialization: 9% complete. Subsystem 'com.vmware.vcloud.common.core' sta...

Figuring out whether you can replicate your VMs across your WAN to a DR site is never easy. There are many factors to consider, but luckily, one of my Veeam peers and a fellow VMware vExpert, Ricky El -Qasem has created a Replication Calculator to help figure it out. From the post on the Virtualize Planet Blog: Replication Bandwidth Calculator | Virtualize Planet ReplicaCalc How many times do...

Dropbox – storage in the Cloud. Everyone talks cloud computing theese days, but not every one knows what’s all about. It’s not comething very complicated that you would never understood. Sometimes a little example of easy stuff can open your mind and understand concepts. One of them is Dropbox for example. I like Dropbox, since it’s very handy, when it ...

Vmworld Europe 2010 – Copenhagen – Bella Center With VMworld Copenhagen coming closer every day, here are some links to check if you haven’t done already, or you can have a look at the PDF of the Program Guide which is available as a download. The theme of VMworld 2010 is “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds”. My tension grows up every day and makes me m...

I had the honor of speaking in front of the Denver VMUG on Tuesday of this week. It was a blast, and I got to meet a great group of people. I received some positive feedback on the presentation that I gave at the VMUG, so I thought I’d share it here as well.   This is my first time using SlideShare, and I’ll probably go back and update the slide deck here since some of the bu...

I was thrilled to know that my blog has been voted number 12 in the Top25 vBlogs voting! Jumping 8 positions from 20th to 12th is something I haven’t expected by any stretch of the imagination! Thank you for voting, and for pushing me further to make this blog better! I have so many ideas (and surprises) coming on the way soon. Stay tuned!

So transparency is a good thing right? Especially since I just found out I have a ‘vendor’ blog *eek* I will make this short and sweet. I have been working on a home lab SRM thingy for a couple weeks. I had completed all my testing with NFS replication and plug-ins. Pretty darn sweet stuff but that is another post coming. When I moved on to the the iSCSI testing everything was kosher until...

The SLOG has been voted 11th in the world out of all of the virtualization blogs. http://vsphere-land.com/news/top-vmware-blogger-results.html Thank you to all that voted for both my Blog and all of the other Blogs out there. Related posts:VOTE NOW – Top 25 VMware Virtualization Blogs VOTE NOW! Lucky 17 VMware Certifies First 2nd Gen CNAs on vSphere 4 VMware MVP – Coming Soon?

Is your vSphere Client slow to update the screen when you run it on Windows 7? VMware just published a workaround for this in their knowledgebase which involves disabling Desktop Composition on the vSphere Client shortcut. One side effect of this though is Desktop Composition is also known as “Aero“  which gives you some of the cool visual effects in Windows 7 like translucent windo...

A new blogger came on to my radar recently. Originally from Buffalo, NJ – Christopher Wells is based in Japan. He’s one of the few bloggers out there writing about virtualization, and writes in English, and gets his stuff translated into Japanese. As I understand it that region is has been slow to adopt virtualization, but its a rapidly growing market. Anyway, if your English or Jap...

I was preparing a post on Storage I/O Control (SIOC) when I noticed this article by Alex Bakman. Alex managed to capture the essence of SIOC in just two sentences. Without setting the shares you can simply enable Storage I/O controls on each datastore. This will prevent any one VM from monopolizing the datatore by leveling out all requests for I/O that the datastore receives. This is exactly t...

Earlier this year as part of the Boston based Gestalt IT Tech Field day we visited the EMC Mothership at Hopkinton.  Whilst here we had a number of informative sessions with one in particular taken by EMC’s Vice President of the VMware Technology Alliance and self confessed geek,  Chad Sakac.  The topic of the session was around Chad’s view on ‘Storage Efficiency’ and p...

Your vSphere VMs may be running from snapshots even though you didn’t create them. That is, if a scheduled job which auto creates snapshots runs into a datastore with insufficient free space. In this scenario a special Consolidate Helper snapshot will be created.  The following screenshot shows the mysterious snapshot as I found it on my lab domain controller In my case, the schedule...

New RSS agregator launched. After the TOP 25 virtualization blogs announced by Eric Siebert, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer, Eric has launched a new RSS agregator which takes the daily blog post from each of the TOP 25 Virtualization blogs and does an extraction of the beginning of the article. Then there is a link to the full article at the end of the resume. For...

At the client site that I’m currently working they are using these USB anywhere hubs from Digi. These USB hubs give you the ability to use USB on virtual machines over a TCP/IP connection. Each USB hub can service one virtual machine and holds up to 4 USB ports. The down side of these USB hubs [...]

VMware KB: Using VPLEX Metro with VMware HA This VMware KB article describes considerations on using VMware HA in conjunction with EMC VPLEX Metro. VMware KB: vMotion over Distance support with EMC VPLEX Metro This VMware KB article describes the use of long-distance vMotion (or vMotion over Distance) with EMC VPLEX Metro. VMware KB: VMware support with NetApp MetroCluster This VMware KB articl...

Since VMworld 2010, I’ve been collecting vCloud Director-related links—and there have been a bunch of them! I’m sure that the short collection I have here are only a subset of all the great material that’s been published on this new product. In any case, here’s my collection of vCloud Director links: VMware: Uptime (Business Continuity) Blog: Backing up, and restori...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #4, the latest collection of virtualization, storage, networking, and other data center-related links, news, thoughts, and views. As always, I hope you find something interesting here! First up, we’ll revisit the idea of multi-hop FCoE. You might recall a couple of articles I wrote a while ago about Network Interface Virtualization (NIV) and the role of NI...

The VMworld conference organizer just sent me feedback from my presentations at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.  He also sent me my VMworld Europe schedule, which I want to share with you.  You’ll have seven opportunities to catch me talking performance at the show and many more to catch me talking trash at a local pub.  Here is my schedule and some comments on what you can expect at eac...