Planet vSphere-land

I got the bug tonight to try one of my old PC games.  I still have several of them on my hard drive dating back to the early to mid 1990′s.  Each time I re-image PC, I make sure that I preserve these games by backing up and restoring their directory structures.  I wasn’t sure if they would work under Windows 7 but I decided to give it a try.  I made a few attempts to get Doom ...

Review of  Trainsignal’s Training course for Exchange Server 2010. My experiences with Trainsignal trainings are as for now very good since as I got the chance and I reviewed some of the VMware vSphere 4 training courses done by David Davis and other vExperts. You can see the wrap-up on those 3 trainings in this post. I was not sure how the Exchange Training was gonna be. Sure...

The Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extender (or “fex”) is an implementation of network interface virtualization. Because the Nexus 2000 fabric extender acts as a remote line card to the upstream IV-capable bridge (a Nexus 5000 series switch, typically), all the configuration takes place on the upstream bridge. In this post, I’ll describe how to connect a Nexus 2148T to a Nexus...

Hi guys, just a quick post to remind you that the next vBeers will be help this Thursday, December 2nd. This month it's a bit of a joint vBeers/StorageBeers so there should be another great turnout. And as it's the festive season feel free to wear your favorite Christmas hat. When & Where The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The C...

Currently I’m involved in a high-secure virtual infrastructure design and we are required to reduce the number of entry points to the virtual infrastructure. One of the requirements is to allow only a single session to the virtual machine console. Due to the increasing awareness \ demand of security in virtual infrastructure more organizations might want to apply this security setting. 1. Tur...

As part of an ongoing effort to expand the functionality of the vSpecialist lab in the EMC RTP facility, we recently added a pair of Cisco MDS 9134 Fibre Channel switches. These Fibre Channel switches are connected to a pair of Cisco Nexus 5010 switches, which handle Unified Fabric connections from a collection of CNA-equipped servers. To connect the Nexus switches to the MDS switches, we used S...

Here is a new video inspired by Alan Renouf’s post. Well I wanted to test Alan’s post on starting SSH service on your ESXi 4.1 host remotely via PowerCLI. And as you know, picture (video) is worth a thousand words…. I’ve done a video of that. Now, I’m not a scripting guy.. not at all. But as you’ll see, powerCLI is quite easy to learn, and easy to...

Symantec VirtualStore is a highly scalable, clustered NAS solution for VMware virtual machine management. Based on the Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System from Symantec, VirtualStore solves the storage challenges of virtual infrastructures with features that provide rapid provisioning of servers and virtual desktops, and efficient cloning and boot up of virtual machines, all thro...

When it comes to patching and updating ESX and ESXi hosts and VMs, solution providers have several options. Remote and local command line utilities are used to update hosts and VMs, and standalone applications, such as the vSphere Host Update Utility and vCenter Update Manager, are also helpful. While command line utilities are just as effective as standalone applications, many customers pre...

Recently, Paul Meehan submitted this question via a comment on the “Memory reclamation, when and how” article: Hi, we are currently considering virtualising some pretty significant SQL workloads. While the VMware best practices documents for SQL server inside VMware recommend turning on ballooning, a colleague who attended a deep dive with a SQL Microsoft MVP came back and the SQL gu...

Thanks to the help from blog sponsorship, I’m able to maintain a higher performing lab environment than I ever had been up until this point.  One area which I hadn’t invested much in, at least from a lab standpoint, is networking.  In the past, I’ve always had some sort of small to mid density unmanageable Ethernet switch.  And this was fine.  Household name brand switches...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #7! This time around I have a collection of links from networking, servers, storage, and virtualization. Our hot topics in this issue include Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and its need—or lack thereof—for congestion management, Ubuntu on Hyper-V, the benefits of VAAI, and more! Networking I have a lot of FCoE-related links this time around. IR...

I love blogging because of the discussions you some times get into. One of the bloggers I highly respect and closely follow is EMC’s vSpecialist Scott Drummonds (former VMware Performance Guru). Scott posted a question on his blog about what the size of a cluster should be. Scott discussed this with Dave Korsunksy and Dan Anderson, both VMware employee, and more or less came to the conclus...

DEC 15th, 2010 – updated a bit based on feedback. Interest from customers on EMC VPLEX is very, very hot, and that’s keeping us very, very busy.   Interest highlights that the core idea of active/active geographically dispersed transactional storage (“access anywhere”) is something people gravitate towards as they dream their next “active/active” virtualized datacenter dre...

Veeam Backp and replication 5.0 setup and first backup. I wanted to show you real setup of the new Veeam backup product which went out about one week after VMworld Copenhagen 2010 this year. I finally make some time for myself and setup Veeam Backup and Replication in my home lab. Concerning my home lab, it’s a very modest all in one box where I’m running VMware Workstat...

I just returned from a one week vacation to a warm sunny beach on a small island not too far from Singapore.  Even on my vacations my conversations often migrate to technology and my travel mate is an old friend and current employee at VMware, Dave Korsunsky.  Sitting by a pool with a cocktail in hand at a fantastic hotel I asked my friend, “what is the right number of hosts per DRS/HA c...

Note: I would like to credit community forum member (and fellow vExpert) WoodyZ for this solution – he answered my VMware Communities Post here I thought I would write this experience up as this its second or third time in my first year of using VMware Fusion. Basically, what can happen is in Unity mode the icons become “generic” Although you can’t tell – one of th...

It is one of those days again… It is time to blog about something different than VMware, virtualization, cloud or storage… Music. Over the last couple of months there are a couple of songs which I just can’t stop listening to. The first song is Parade Of the Dead by the almighty Black Label Society. I realize that many of you might not appreciate Black Label Society but this is...

Over the holiday break, I spent some time cleaning up some of the development virtual machines in our ghettoDatacenter. I came across the VMware Auto Deploy appliance that I deployed awhile back ago. I did not think I had a use for it since we already have an automated deployment system using PXE and kickstart. Auto Deploy was launched relatively recently from the VMware Flings lab. It was origi...

EMC is putting on some great webcasts in December all around virtualization, consider this an early Christmas present! Join some of the biggest names in the industry for two hot discussion on desktop virtualization, then join the VP of VMware Alliances, Chad Sakac, for “Chad’s Choice” - an off the cuff discussion of whats new and whats hot in virtualization technology today. Yo...

Wow!  I can’t believe Christmas is upon us once again, where has this year gone?  I know they say time goes faster with age but this is ridiculous.  Though as with almost everything there is a silver lining and in this instance it means that the festive season is upon us and as such what better time to have a Christmas vBeers! This month’s vBeers will be a little bit spe...

This weeks vendorwag I’m chatting to Burke Azbill of the vCO (VMware vCenter Orchestrator) Team. In case you don’t know the vCO Team have launched a brand new blog – in effort to galvanize the VMware Community to use vCO, and in ease the way into using it. Burke Azbill is an IT professional with 15 years of experience in tech-support, network administration, web development, p...

How to make reapear your VMware Tools Icon, in case it got lost somehow. This is a quick how-to. Really no brainer, but worth to remember. In this KB recently refreshed it’s discussed a situation when you won’t see the VMware Tools icon in the taskbar anymore. What to do? There is just this VMware KB that I want to share with you ans which discuss right that. To be able t...

While I was prepping my upcoming “vSphere Advanced Troubleshooting” presentation for the Dutch VMUG event 2010, I stumbled upon a great presentation by Mark Monce. It’s called “Transitioning to ESXi with vSphere 4.1” and contains a lot of information like: Overview of ESXi Hardware Monitoring and Systems Management Infrastructure Services Command Line Interfaces Diagnostics and Tr...

It’s only two weeks until the annual dutch VMUG with a very impressive speaker line-up. Many international speakers are going to deliver great sessions, workshops and Q/A-sessions at the Nieuwegein Business Center (NBC) on December 10th. If you’re interest and work involves virtualization and you haven’t registered yet, you should!. This is an event [...] by Erik Scholten ...