Planet vSphere-land

Cloning and/or moving vMA is not supported by VMware, this has been the case since VIMA 1.0. If you take look at the "Known Issues" in the vMA release notes, you will see there is no still workaround. Users may find it useful to be able to clone vMA for backup purposes or to deploy another vMA without having to re-download or re-uploading .OVF from your local desktop/VMware's website. If you eve...

Hey Folks, it’s that time of the month again when there is the opportunity to mix, mingle and chat with your fellow virtualization fans/geeks/enthusiasts (delete where applicable) at the London vBeers! With Cisco Live London on this week it was tempting to move it to earlier in the week though there was the risk that such a move would create a disturbance in the force, and more likely confu...

OK – background here… EMC Sales Kickoff 2011.   At HQ, we knew we had a killer 2010 (which is now public) – with growth everywhere.   HQ wanted to say “THANK YOU” to the field at large, and our leadership team came up with this idea.  Literally days later, the whole thing is setup, and the office (including manufacturing) are all “glee’d” up for a crazy...

Folks – if you haven’t registered yet, and you’re a VMware, EMC or Cisco partner – you’re going to miss out. Working furiously on the EMC boot camp (Tuesday, starts at 9am) and I hope to make it epic.  In my section I’ll be: Challenging myself to a Pecca Kucha presentation (look it up – this will be a gas) Explaining where you can expect to see VMware and EMC go to ma...

It took a while, but finally here it is the VCDX 4 program. Now some of us who were fortunate enough to complete the VCDX 3 certification and managed to pass VCAP-DCD are already a VCDX 4, but for those of you who just started the journey now is the time to start digging! In general the process hasn’t really changed all that much: Pass the VCP exam Pass the VCAP-DCA exam Pass the VCAP-DCD...

V2V process of VMware Workstation VM into ESX When you do a V2V conversion of a Virtual Machine made in VMware Workstation 7 into ESX Server Virtual Machine by using VMware Converter Standalone installed inside of the VM, you might run into a situation like I did. I ended up with VMware tools from VMware Workstation inside of my destination VM. And I was not able to uninstall the pac...

Another year is gone and almost another month to boot. I’m not really sure where the time went but I do know I spent a lot of it with customers and the rest of it working with engineering to get out some new products. As you all know I’ve been working on cloud for the last 2 years. My role has me working on a lot of stuff that’s .next or even .next.next. That makes for some rea...

This is a joint post of three prominent writers in the virtualization community: Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe, and Maish Saidel-Keesing. For the past 6 months we have been working on a joint project. It has actually been kept pretty quiet, and it is now time to make this public. Previous VMware vSphere books have focused on how to master the technology, deep-diving into certain elements and giving...

Recently, I reached out to the VCritical sponsors and asked them each for an update to share with readers.  Here is what’s happening with some of the top vendors in virtualization management today — in their own words: eG Innovations Since 2001, eG Innovations has been a pioneer in end-to-end IT performance monitoring. The eG VDI Monitor, part of the eG Enterprise suite, offers end-...

This is a joint post by three prominent writers in the virtualization community: Maish Saidel-Keesing, Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie. For the past 6 months we have worked together on a new book.  This has been kept pretty quiet, but it’s now time to make it public. Previous VMware vSphere books have focused on how to master the technology, deep-diving into certain elemen...

My latest customer was still running on VMware ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 and asked me to upgrade their environment. Their whole environment was running on NetApp storage and for ESX there is a change in the Storage Array Type Policy (SATP) and the Path Selection Policy (PSP) when moving from ESX 3.5 to 4.1. I started with this blogpost by Nick Triantos: vSphere: Upgrading from non-ALUA to A...

The next Amsterdam vBeers will be held on Thursday 3rd of Feb starting at 6:30pm in ‘Herengracht Cafe’ which is placed close to Leidseplein and Dam Square. This venue serves a fine of selection of beers along with soft drinks and bar food. What are vBeers? Read More Drinks will not be paid for, there will not be a tab. When you buy a drink please pay for it as no one else will b...

Simon Long of The SLOG is introducing vBeers to Holland. I’ve copied the text from his vBeers blog article. Every month Simon Seagrave and I try organise a social get together of like-minded Virtualization enthusiasts held in a pub in central London (and Amsterdam). We like to call it vBeers. Before I go on, I would just like to state, although it’s called vBeers, you do NOT have to...

I’ve been asked to present a webinar at this months upcoming ‘EMC Live Webcast Series’ and have decided that a session on installing, configuring and running the EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) would be good fun and hopefully a topic of interest that many of you may enjoy tuning into.  It is scheduled to run on the following date: Thursday 3rd February 2011 8:00 a...

OK, VMware enthusiasts all over the world, grab your schedules and write this down: by Erik Scholten

vMA's vi-fastpass and vifptarget utility is meant to be used interactively on the command line, this requires the user to set a particular target (ESX,ESXi or vCenter host) and then execute either a vCLI and/or vSphere SDK for Perl script. If you want to stay in the context of a particular server (e.g without having to manually specify --server parameter), you would need to manually change the t...

I had the privilege this past week of speaking at the Triad VMUG meeting in Greensboro, NC, along with fellow blogger, podcaster (is that a real word?), and speaker Rich Brambley. In the event you were unable to attend (there was quite a crowd attending), here’s the presentation I gave at the meeting. Feel free to share any additional thoughts, questions, or comments below. Thank you! T...

http://www.vmworld.com/index.jspa via StevenVirtual

There is a new blog post at the VMware Fusion blog that I would like to point to. If you’re MAC user and wondering whether to buy Parallels Desktop 6 , VMware Fusion 3.1  to run Windows application on your MAC, this article could interest you. The article discuss the latest compare with Parallels Desktop 6.0. It’s a fair review which gives you all the details you need wh...

GOOD: Was a great week out in Barcelona  with the EMC vSpecialist EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) crew during our 2011 kickoff.   I’m honored to be part of the team, and a spiritual leader :-) GOOD: Another good thing was I got to play with Isilon more this week.  I’ve seen a lot of “simple” in storage land (from EMC and much from outside EMC), but this thing...

So, personally, I think this is a big deal. I’m on record saying – hey, I think NAS + iSCSI (and post-facto, I’ll add Object storage as I’ve become wiser, though still learning) will “win” long term (note that “win” doesn’t mean exclusively).   BTW – if you want to see the dialog/wager, you can read it here.   One way or another, someone’s getting ...

This weeks vendorwag is with cloud automation vendor DynamicOps – I’m talking to Leslie Muller who is the company’s CTO and Founder. Here’s his bio from the DynamicOps website: As CTO, Leslie Muller is responsible for the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Leslie has over 18 years of commercial experience as an entrepreneur, developer, chief a...

Last week I visited a new project at which the client wants to virtualize their desktops. During the kickoff the client mentioned that they use a variety of applications, clients and operating systems and want to deliver all these desktop flavors to their users. Nothing new so far. But this variety of clients and operating [...] by Erik Scholten

This question pops up from time to time on the VMTN community forums on how to increase the size of /var/log on vMA. By default, the /var/log partition is configured to ~500MB, which is a decent size for system logs, but one of the features of vMA is vilogger which adds a syslog capability for your ESX and ESXi hosts. This allows you to ship all your host logs over to vMA, the problem is the log...

RV Tools – a very popular freeware application released. RVtools is very popular freeware which you can download from Rob de Veij – owner of www.robware.net. I have written several articles about this tool in the past: - RVtools from Rob de Veij is updated to 2.6 - RVTools demo video - RVTools – 2.5.5 version is out. - RV tools update with new feature – Filter...