Planet vSphere-land

virtuallyGhetto would like to welcome Opvizor as our latest blog sponsor. Opvizor is a SaaS based application that detects issues that may affect your virtualized IT environment before they cause instability and impact performance. The analysis is done by uploading your host or virtual machine logs to Opvizor, in which they can be processed by their intelligent rule-set or shared amongst your pe...

ESXi is the product to deploy, how? Those 2 books might help you with that. In no particular order, I’ll start with the first one. Dave Mishchenko the author of this book. VMware ESXi is the easiest way to get started with virtualization — and it’s free. It allows administrators to consolidate their applications onto fewer servers and start saving money through reduced hardwa...

This year I will be writing a third edition of my book on VMware SRM. As part of that process I moved back into a new collocation facility near where I live, and started the process of getting my begging bowl out looking for help and support from the storage vendors. I’m pleased to say that a long side EMC and NetApp – Dell have agreed to support my project. So the new book will cove...

If you are planing on upgrading to the recent release of ESX(i) 4.1 Update 1 from ESX(i) 4.1, you may want to verify that you will not be impacted by a previous security/password bug found in ESX(i)4.1. The security bug that was identified with ESX(i) 4.1 was the encryption algorithm which changed from default MD5 as previous releases of ESX(i) to legacy DES.This bug has since been resolved and ...

Customers are moving away from silos of information and moving toward shared infrastructures to virtualized environments and eventually to the cloud to increase agility and reduce costs. As a means to accelerate customers move toward a shard cloud platform Cisco, NetApp, and VMware released FlexPod™; a preconfigured and validated cloud architecture built on the Cisco® Unified Computing System...

This weeks chinwag is with Thomas Bryant. Thomas has been around in the virtualization space for quite sometime, and we first met in those early days on the VMTN Communities. You might know Thomas from his handle Kix1979 – which he used on the forums. Thomas works for Quest – but prior to that he was at VizionCore (which was acquired by Quest sometime ago), and before that with the ...

When installing, configuring, or managing VMware virtual infrastructure, one of the steps which should be performed before releasing a host (back) to production is to perform operational readiness tests.  One test which is quite critical is that of testing virtual infrastructure networking.  After all, what good is a running VM if it has no connectivity to the rest of the network?  Each ESX o...

Virtualization Management Index – Part 2 In December vKernel released Virtualization Management Index on which I reported in my article here. You can now downoad the PDF document freshly released together with part 1 included. Bryan Semple from vKernel actually now pushes the study a bit further selecting environments with 50 and more VMs etc… A quick quote from the Pdf report: To ...

I noticed this evening that WordPress 3.1 was available and my blog’s dasboard was coaxing me to upgrade.  Every single time I have upgraded, I have made a backup before hand.  At the end of a long week, my logic was shot and I proceeded with the upgrade without a backup.  As luck would have it, my Windows Server 2003 and IIS based blog no longer worked.  Page loads were an endless hou...

I recently received an interesting question in my mailbox. Someone wanted to know if it was possible to enable/disable the logging for a Virtual Machine through PowerCLI. These Virtual Machine logs can be a handy resource when analysing problems. This logging option is available through the vSphere client when you select Edit Settings and then Options-Advanced-General. In that form there is a c...

I blogged about this almost two months ago and just on Luc’s blog that the release date has been set and the cover art was released. I wanted to remind all of you the book that is one of a kind, VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere. Release date: 28th of March Authors: Luc Dekens, Alan Renouf, Glen Sizemore, Arnim van Lieshout, Jonathan Medd ISB: 0470890797 "Power...

EMC Webcasts are in full effect! Over 20,000 viewers have registered for these webcasts, why haven’t you!? Every Thursday we cover the hottest topics hitting the virtualization scene, and this month isn’t going to be any different! We have five hot topics for you this month, everything from Virtualizing Oracle to Delivering IT as a Service! And for a special treat we have Chad’...

vmware Labs has released vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, their first stab into management of non-VMware virtualized environments. vCenter XVP Manager allows you to use the vSphere Client to manage Hyper-V Server 2008 hosts and their associated virtual machines, it also allows you to easily migrate those Hyper-V based virtual machines into VMware virtual machines. The installation is pretty si...

vmware just dropped another dot release to their flagship desktop virtualization product, View. vmware View 4.6 is now officially available for download. Although this release is mostly a ton of bug fixes rolled up into a single package, there are a number of great new features including PCoIP support when going through a Security Server as well as Sync Support for iPhone and iPad users. Like I ...

I needed to run an appliance inside VMware Fusion on my Mac, the appliance was in OVF format. VMware Fusion currently does not support this format and requires you to convert the image with a tool called ovftool which can be downloaded at the following location: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/ovf Conversion is as simple as: ./ovftool "source.ovf" "target" Op...

My website has got a face lift with comfy 3.09 update. It’s been some time since I use the comfy theme from Deluxethemes.com, but I never actually checked if there is an updates or bug fixes. Since the website was upgraded regularly with latest WordPress, I haven’t actually been worried about an upgrade. I also tweaked the old theme here and there, put some snippet code here and th...

New version of VMware View has been released. One of the new features included in this version is certainly the PCoIP Security Server. What is it? The PCoIP Security Server can handle incoming connection to View Connection Server The new release of VMware View is here! The new version 4.6 includes new features as well as feature enhancements. The highlights for version 4.6 are the following. ...

There is a free virtualization MAG in PDF format to download – completely free. Two bloggers are behind the virtualizetips.com blog: Brian Suhr and Mike Mills. Those two guys are running a blog at Virtualizetips.com, which has been lauched at September 2009, but which I was not aware of. It’s high quality blog which has got lot’s of categories not only specializing on VMware,...

I love Dropbox. I mean really. I use it for sharing among my team, my family, and as a direct code working area. I can open up Visual Studio on one laptop, move to another, and go back to my workstation without even thinking about syncing or anything. I am a paying customer and feel like I get every dime in increased productivity. But, one side effect of using Dropbox is that it is sometimes blo...

Last night VMware released the new version of VMware View. The new version 4.6 includes new features, product improvements and more than 160 bug fixes. Here is a list: Security servers PCoIP support Security servers now include a PCoIP Secure Gateway component which offers the following advantages: The only remote desktop traffic that can enter [...] by Erik Scholten

Well, I think the blogpost title kind of says it all. As of today my View 4.5 Guide is now completely free to download. Why I have a decided to this. Well, for a couple of reasons. 1. View 4.6 was released today – introducing new functionality. In particular the Security Server is now compatible with PCoIP. It’s always been my policy that as new version comes out. I either write an u...

I was just answering some questions on the VMTN forum when someone asked the following question: Should I upgrade our VMFS luns from 3.21 (some in 3.31) to 3.46 ? What benefits will we get? This person was referred to an article by Frank Brix Pedersen who states the following: Ever since ESX3.0 we have used the VMFS3 filesystem and we are still using it on vSphere. What most people don’t kn...

Look this is a VERY lengthy article. At nearly 8K words, its not really a blogpost. As such I thought folks might also want this in a PDF format offline so they can read it at their leisure. A couple of weeks ago it was my good fortune to attend a new class on Microsoft Desktop and Application virtualization. If you’re interested the course is 10324A – Implementing and Managing Desktop Virt...

So, everyone wants more performance, always.   As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it’s REALLY hard to generate a “VMware IO workload”, and most benchmarks out there aren’t that good at the IO part of a VMware benchmark. Even VMmark 2.0 which is a great CPU/memory tile-based, mixed workload benchmark doesn’t really stress the IO subsystems particularly hard. This means ...

Thinapp 4.6.1 is a maintenance release. A new version of ThinApp has been released. This maintenance release covers more than 160 fixes. Some of those fixes are for example for Google Chrome running on x64 bit platforms, WordPerfect, Ad-Aware2008, vSphere 3.5U5 on XP, Victor Player, Firefox + Foxit Reader 4.2, Office communicator, HP Peregrine, SAGE, iTunes 9.2.1, and Equation editor for Micr...