Planet vSphere-land

Recently while performing some skunkworks testing in my personal lab, I came across a slew of documented and undocumented virtual machine .vmx configuration parameters. Using one of my favorite UNIX/Linux utility strings, I was able to uncover some interesting things in the /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx binary which is used to load a virtual machines configuration file.Here are some of the inte...

There are currently no methods of controlling the number of VMware snapshots using vCenter or ESX(i) permissions today, you either provide the snapshot privilege or you deny it all together. I recently discovered an undocumented .vmx entry that allows you to control the maximum number of VMware snapshots for a given virtual machine. By default, a virtual machine can have a snapshot tree depth of...

Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time. McAfee now has a product especially for virtualized environments, McAfee MOVE (Management for Optimized Virtual Environments). After Trend Micro, McAfee is now the second anti-virus company, that I know of, which [...] by Erik Scholten

It’s Halloween time… and here are some giveaways from Digiarty. Thanks to Viola from Digiarty Software I was informed just in time about this Giveaway. You can put hand on a full product (no trial 30 days…) of their Converting software – WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe – for Windows or Mac users. Supporting Multi-CPU and Hyper Threading, WinX HD Vi...

VMware vSphere Design classroom training wrapped up today by covering modules 6, 7, and 8 which was Storage design, VM design, and Management/Monitoring design, respectively. In the storage module, we talked a lot about protocols, IOPS, capacity, tuning, zoning, multipathing, and RAID types.  Furthermore, we applied rating indexes to the protocols and technologies such as cost, complexity, and...

I missed the release (probably due to VMworld 2010 excitement), but a month later I’ve discovered that Dutch rock star Rob de Veij has provided the community with an update to his free VMware virtualization utility RVTools.  Version 2.9.5 boasts the following new features: On vInfo tab new field: Guest heartbeat status. The heartbeat status is classified as: gray – VMware Tools ar...

The VCDX3 logos have been released by VMware for use on business cards and professional communications.  Going forward, VMware will be making these new logos available on shirts, certificates, business cards, etc. Normal: Reverse:     Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republ...

Due to VMworld 2010, my job interviews and the problems with our Zimbra mail server we haven’t had the time to ‘celebrate’ our 2 year anniversary. So a bit late. Two years ago, in October 2008, we started our website/blog called VMGuru.nl and we had an amazing first year. But our second year was even [...] by Erik Scholten

As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s article about interoperability between RecoverPoint and the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), I wanted to post a short “how to” on disabling VAAI for interoperability with RecoverPoint. I’ll show you how to disable all three VAAI primitives, but keep in mind that only the hardware-accelerated copy and hardware-accelerated zero...

My blog posts have been sparse as of late. With all that's been going on in recent weeks; from the VMworld events to the upcoming NetApp Insight events and a massive fall product launch, I haven't had much time to sleep let alone blog!I promise I'll correct the latter and return to a regular cadence soon.It took an opportunity to sit down with storage industry pundit, Stephen Foskett, and the se...

Are you looking for something fun and exciting to do in November? How about a free technology event with a tie to virtualization? Nexus Information Systems, a regional leader in sales and service of hardware, storage, networking, and managed services, has cooked up something for you! On Wednesday November 10th, Nexus is hosting an all day event called GeekFest 2010 at their offices in Minnetonka...

nComputing was present at VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen. If you have not had the chance to attend VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen, you would certainly be holding in your hands one of the devices being given away at the nComputing stand. The device presented there was a small lightweight client L 300 which was given away for interested users and bloggers. I agreed to test the device an...

VMware has released the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD Live Lab Tutorials which can help you prepare for the actual exam. The VCAP4-DCA is directed toward System Administrators, Consultants and Technical Support Engineers who can demonstrate their skills in VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter technologies in relation to the datacenter, as well as their knowledge of application and physical-infras...

As most of you probably already know, the addition of the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) was a major new feature of VMware vSphere 4.1. For those of you not familiar with VAAI, the short story is that these APIs enable VMware ESX/ESXi to offload certain types of storage operations to VAAI-compliant storage arrays in order to increase efficiency. This new functionality is supported on...

Day 2 of 3 is in the books.  We started the morning on Module 4 VMware vSphere Virtual Datacenter Design.  The discussion included topics such as: vCenter Server requirements, sizing, placement, and high availability vCenter and VUM database sizing and placement Clusters Size HA, failover, isolation, design DRS FT DPM Resource Pools Shares Reservations A lot of networking, including the s...

I was researching FT documentation to find out more about asymmetric logging traffic between primary and secondary FT VMs when I stumbled onto a KB article which the document mentioned. VMware KB 1011965 talks about changing the traffic pattern on the FT logging network. This is particularly helpful for a high read disk I/O FT protected VM. Normally, all disk I/O is going to traverse the FT l...

VDR not mounting automatically a deduplication store. I was having issues with not mounting automatically the backup destination after rebooting the VDR appliance since some time now. This was happening in my environment since I upgraded to the VDR 1.2. This is something that I was aware of and I usually mount the destination deduplication stores after the reboot manually. It ...

Well – if you’re a nitpicker – technically, VCE and Vblock were launched on Nov 4th, 2009.   But, hey, if you want to be a REAL nitpicker, VCE existed internally to the 3 parents about 1 year prior to public launch in a less visible way.  I remember fondly being introduced to Cisco’s project California before the world knew about UCS (see Ed Bugnion and I presenting at V...

Today was day 1 of 3 for my VMware vSphere Design Workshop training.  I’ve been looking forward to this training since spring of this year when I scheduled it.  The timing couldn’t be better since I’m scheduled to sit the VMware VCAP-DCD BETA exam in November.  I’m told by the instructor, an EMC employee of eight years as well as a CLARiiON and SRM specialist, that th...

When it comes to securing virtual environments, you have to take different measures from those for traditional physical security. With virtual security, new attack vectors –that is, the means by which a hacker gains control of a server OS — must be protected to prevent breaches. Because of these vectors — and thus risks — virtual security requires you to secure the host a...

Recently Patrick O’Rourke of Microsoft posted insightful commentary on his VMworld Europe 2010 experience, skillfully concluding that the keynote content was almost the same as the San Francisco keynote.  No word on whether or not he noticed that most of the breakout sessions were the same.  Or the labs… But that’s not what caught my eye today as I was sifting through some ol...

I’ve seen this question passing by a couple of times now and I found myself going through the document to dig up the reference. I thought it would come in handy to document it: Q) What is the disk size requirements for ESXi installable? A) The minimal required disk size is 5GB (Page 24, ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide), recommend is 6GB (KB: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026500)...

When I entered the competition on yellow-bricks, I showed a list of the sessions and labs I would like to do as my reason for going. I think it is only fair to show what I actually did whilst I was there. I was able to do the majority of the breakout sessions I wanted to and all the labs I hoped to complete. You do need to remain flexible on the breakout sessions some clash with each other and ...

Having recently re-certified as CCNA, I can definitely attest that subnetting is something you must master if you want to achieve a Cisco certification. Rightfully so; mastering subnetting is critical to being an effective network administrator, in my opinion. I recently came across a series of articles designed to help improve people’s subnetting skills. If you are struggling with subnett...

Is this or that product works on that or not? Where to see? In this video from VMware you’ll see the new Interoperability matrix page in action. With the numbers of versions of products, it a great idea to be able to see which version of product is compatible with which version of platform. Picture is worth thousand words, but video does even better… -:). In this s...