Planet vSphere-land

This evening I had a cool GoToMeeting with Tintri’s David Friedlander and VP of Engineering Pratik Wadher. They showed me their new Tintri VMstore, it’s the first VM aware storage system. The VMstore T440 is an 8.5 TB hardware appliance that is designed from the ground up for hosting virtual machines through 10 GigE NFS.Tintri uses virtual machine abstractions. VMs and virtual...

I’ve seen a ton of UCS environments out at the various cloud providers and enterprises I’ve been working with. You have to hand it to Cisco – they have really built something fantastic and know how to sell it. That’s not the point of this post though. This is to announce our new vCO plug-in for UCS. We developed this in conjunction with the UCS product engineering team at...

I’ve seen a ton of UCS environments out at the various cloud providers and enterprises I’ve been working with. You have to hand it to Cisco – they have really built something fantastic and know how to sell it. That’s not the point of this post though. This is to announce our new vCO plug-in for UCS. We developed this in conjunction with the UCS product engineering team at...

Need more storage? Your Free Dropbox account is not enough? UPDATE: As one of my readers just warned me through a comment, which you can read bellow, I’m updating my post by quoting a section from the Amazon’s Terms of use agreement for the Cloud Drive… A quote from the TOS: 5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your a...

Cisco had a pretty major product/technology launch today. I was briefed on the product launch some time ago—one of the perks of being a “leading blogger”—and so it was great to see this stuff finally come to light. I haven’t had the chance to read some of the other blog posts on the topic (I know there have been several), so I apologize for any duplication. First, l...

I want a template replicator vApp… Here’s the problem: Companies that have more than one office split by a WAN link, have problems keeping their templates in sync.  There are two common approaches to this: 1) When updating a template, touch each site and update the same template in each location. 2) Update a master template and copy it out to each site. Neither of t...

In the past when I’ve been at customer sites and in competitive situations I’ve often brought up the broad support for different OSs as a VMware strength. I think at last count there were over 80 different versions and flavors of various operating systems supported on the VMware platform – probably more than that today. What brought this back to mind was a recent video where so...

In the past when I’ve been at customer sites and in competitive situations I’ve often brought up the broad support for different OSs as a VMware strength. I think at last count there were over 80 different versions and flavors of various operating systems supported on the VMware platform – probably more than that today. What brought this back to mind was a recent video where so...

New Update of VMware Workstation has been released – it’s the version 7.1.4 and it adds W7 SP1 and Ubuntu 10.10 support. The new VMware Workstation 7.1.4 is available.  This is a maintenance release only that fix known issues. The new features and fixes: - Windows 7 SP1 and Ubuntu 10.10 support for guest and host operating systems - Support for capture video files bigger than 1 G...

It seems to be survey month…. Nevertheless this survey will take you a couple of minutes and is about Virtual Machine Storage and Snapshots. Most of our PMs are currently revising / updating and prioritizing the roadmap and real customer data and opinions are always welcome to define these. We would appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes of your time to complete this one, it is 12 quest...

Cisco today launched a wide-ranging set of updates to their Datacenter Business Advantage portfolio.   To me – this is like EMC’s own Mega-Launch in January.   Like us (in January, we refreshed/launched 41 products all at once), they have updated not one product, but a whole portfolio at once. For what it’s worth (I’m just one voice) – color me impressed. ...

Just a quick reminder to you all that the VMworld 2011 Call for Papers is ending soon (5th April)!  If you’ve ever fancied presenting a session on a VMware related topic close to your heart then this is a fantastic opportunity.  I was fortunate enough to have presented with Eric Siebert and Simon Gallagher at last year’s VMworld San Francisco event and thoroughly enjoyed the exp...

After 5 years at Centric Alex has accepted a new challenge and on May 1st he will be following Edwin, Anne Jan and myself to Imtech ICT. At Imtech ICT his new job will be Solution Architect. We are very excited that Alex is coming over to join our team and wish him all the [...] by Erik Scholten

You can get 15% discount for VMware Workstation and 25% discount for VMware Fusion 3.1 by using coupon codes below. Update: I published this post few days ago, but the promotion was not effective yet. So now it’s here and I wanted to share it with my readers here. But If you want to proffit this offer, you must hurry up since it expires at the end of the month of March 2011. VMware Fusio...

Well – by popular vote – here it is.   This week’s webcast is on Thursday, March 31, 2011 (8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 15:00 GMT Performance Troubleshooting: My personal toolbox and techniques Abstract: “Storage performance is one of VMware’s root cause of support and performance issues.   This webcast will cover the tools and techniques I personally use with my...

Today, SingTel announced their PowerOn cloud. This is a new VMware powered cloud based on the VMware vCloud Datacenter Service. VMware had previously announced a partnership with SingTel but now that cloud is up and operational and ready to take on load in the Asian market. I really have to thank my team members in all of APAC for pulling together to get this one off the ground. It was a really ...

Today, SingTel announced their PowerOn cloud. This is a new VMware powered cloud based on the VMware vCloud Datacenter Service. VMware had previously announced a partnership with SingTel but now that cloud is up and operational and ready to take on load in the Asian market. I really have to thank my team members in all of APAC for pulling together to get this one off the ground. It was a really ...

Disclaimer: Now, lets make this very clear. Don’t touch “useANO” unless you are specifically instructed to do so, this article is just for educational purposes. I had some issues in my lab with an ALUA array. (If you have no clue what ALUA is, read this post.) As you hopefully know with an ALUA array you typically have 4 paths. Two of these paths are marked within vCenter as &...

VMware Admins has got another choice for free monitoring of ESX(i) hosts and managing them. First of all, I’d like to welcome Solarwinds as a new sponsor for my ESX Virtualization MAG website. If you’re not a regular reader, consider subscribing by Google Reader (or other RSS reader), because with the daily website updates you will not miss an article. The subscriptions are Free. I...

While recently updating my Automating Active Directory Domain Join in ESX(i) Kickstart article, it reminded me an old blog post by Justin Guidroz who initially identified a way to add an ESXi host to vCenter using python and the vSphere MOB. The approach was very neat but was not 100% automated as it required some user interaction with the vSphere MOB to identify certain API properties before on...

Real world.  Real Customer.  Real Data.   And there you go. http://storagesavvy.com/2011/03/26/real-world-emc-fastvp-and-fastcache-results/

We’re gotten some small scale reports of customers who are finding that after running after some time with VAAI on their VMAX arrays are finding performance degradation.   Usually this correlates with excessive back-end load and high read cache misses. This is covered in primus article emc261696 (http://knowledgebase.emc.com). Don’t jump to a conclusion – if you think you migh...

After a busy and hectic weekend VMGuru.nl is back online. During the first two years of VMGuru.nl Alex provided the hosting services. He was a member of a co-locating club and owned a personal web server with adequate bandwidth. But during the years our demands grew and we got ourselves a new server and Alex [...] by Erik Scholten

Upgrading from vSphere 4.0 to 4.1 isn’t too difficult with the help of vCenter Update Manager (VUM). I covered this in my Best of vSphere 4.1 for vNerds video (included free with every Train Signal vSphere video training course) and the 23 minute video below is one piece of that course. In this video, you’ll learn: How to download the ESX and ESXi upgrade packages How to import VUM ...

There was an update toVMware Go Pro and introduction 2 new Features. Few weeks ago there was an update to the VMware Online Tool called VMware Go™. VMware Go™ is a free service which helps you to create your hypervisors while being OnLine and then create and manage your VMs. In fact, as you can read in the press release on VMware vSphere blog, 3 main features were introduced in the Pro (pa...