Planet vSphere-land

Every day there are a bunch of “hot issues” that come up – most aren’t worth a broadcast (which can actually cause more damage than it helps) but these two are (IMO) worth drawing attention to for the sake of the customer. Emulex HBAs with vSphere (frankly – this isn’t an EMC issue per se, but since customers look to eLab for HBA firmware revs…)   It was discovered by...

VMware Compatibility Guide 2.0 Preview is now available, including the enhanced user interface and navigation with additional features and enhancements. Rick Blythe over at VMwarewolf reports: VMware has rolled out a new and improved compatibility web page. It is hoped this makes it easy to find compatible systems, I/O devices, storage and guest operating systems.   The 2.0 guide ...

Over the past 5 years, server virtualization has changed the data center forever and these changes have had a far-reaching impact on data center architectures and operations. One of the areas often discussed as having been affected, is the ever increasing shared storage footprint. I’d suggest to you, that in my customer engagements storage costs are concern 1A closely followed by concern 1B, b...

My previous post showing the VPLEX Geo / GoogleMaps mashup was an early version and low quality. I created this one to better show the UI and recorded it at 60FPS using my HD camera. thanks, .nick Related Posts:Behind the theme music : Chad’s WorldFistful of Cloud : Interactive Cloud DemoBeing a vSpec : One year under the beltInteractive Cloud Video : Chad Sakac Demo / VMware PEX 2011Creating...

It’s been an interesting 2 years, and a milestone for many – we’re coming up on the 2 year anniversary of the Cisco UCS FCS, which will formally be on June the 20th. I remember it like it was yesterday.   It was the early part of 2009 when I was pulled into a series of meetings with Soni, Ed, Prem, Luca, Mario and a small set of others who were part of the Nuova Systems startup ...

Lately I was working on the redesign of my lab at home and I purchased a Cisco L3 capable switch. In my quest for a VMware vSphere homelab, I recently purchased my first Cisco switch. You could see it in my recent post called My switch adventures where I bought the wrong switch because of similarities in the device’s model numbers. If you’re seeking cheap L3 switch make sure you re...

Charging for cloud storage must account for two costs: the cost of the capacity used and the cost of access to that capacity. For the cost of access, current systems focus on the work requested, such as data transferred or I/O operations completed, rather than the exertion (i.e., effort/resources expended) to complete that work. But, the provider’s cost is based on the exertion, and the e...

VMware vSphere networking is available in two variations — Standard vSwitch and Distributed Switch (vDS) — that accommodate a wide range of requirements for any environment.  Standard switches are simple to set up and understand, but the effort to manage them scales along with the number of ESXi hosts managed.  While that management can certainly be automated, e.g., through PowerCL...

Simon Long and Simon Seagrave have launched a new website today. The website is called vBeers and was created to provide an opportunity for virtualization enthusiasts and professionals to meet and enjoy discussing all things virtualization and anything else in the world of tech.Simon Long: vBeers was created as a non-commercial event and is intended as something for the virtualization commu...

After many months of on again, off again work Simon Long and myself are pleased to announce… vBeers.org ! We’ve been keen to produce a centralised vBeers site for the virtualization community to come and check and inform others on any vBeers events that they or others may be organised.  If you are wondering “what is vBeers?” then head over to the new vBeers site and check out the...

I'm sure most of you have heard of vBeers by now. if you haven't, where have you been? You can read more about it here Simon Seagrave and I been putting this together the new vbeers.org website over the past 6 months, inbetween our busy schedules. It still needs a few tweeks, but we think it's ready to be launched to the world. The idea of the vBeer.org website is to give vBeers go&...

A free product from VMware to check your Virtual Infrastructure running under VMware vSphere. This product is a free download from VMware Website and can check your existing installation of VMware vSphere against the VMware vSphere Hardening Guidelines. With this free tool which should be used in small and mid-size environments. Which means it’s not a replacement for the security auditin...

As of version 4.6 VMware View came with some PowerCLI Cmdlets, I wrote a post about these recently after they were released explaining why this was both a good and a bad thing. I have seen a couple of posts since then using View PowerCLI : Gabe’s script to automatically retrieve set the Dynamically assigned IP address of the PCOIP connection – Highly recommended for anyone messing with view...

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (19cad386-97dd-4248-b4ce-882057c1d909 - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7) Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (e500d366-5ea3-4767-a4d5-5eafd26872dd – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7) is a post from: Virtu-Al. Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of V...

There was an interesting question this week on the VMTN community forums about querying a vSwitch on an ESX(i) host. The user was trying to locate a particular virtual machine's MAC Address due to an IP conflict that was identified. The internal VMware vSwitch is pretty much closed off as a blackbox. The vSwitch is not exposed like a traditional physical switch in which you can run commands agai...

When you’re building a new home lab or adding a new white box to your private cloud, you want to put as much memory into your servers as you can. It’s the same story as in most of the datacenters, CPUs are idling while your ESX servers are running out of memory. Intel has released a new chipset that might be worth a closer look. The Intel Desktop Board DQ67SW supports four 240-pin ...

I found a little video presenting VMware vCenter Operations In this video you’ll see the the presentation of VMware vCenter Operations. This new product from VMware can proactively manage the performance of your Virtual Infrastructure running under vSphere. The product is sold per pack of 25 VMs… so it might end up quite expensive for the end user, since other software vendors in t...

I had this question coincidentally two times of the last 3 weeks and I figured that it couldn’t hurt explaining it here as well. The question on the VMTN community was as follows: on 13 sec: a host which hears from none of the partners will ping the isolation address on 14 sec: if no reply from isolation address it will trigger the isolation response on 15 sec: the host will be declared de...

This weeks chinwag is with Dante Orsini of iland.com. I recently hooked up with representative of iland.com in my local city of Nottingham in the UK. It was just an informal cloud chat over a lunch time bite to eat. As ever these sort of informal discussions are always very interesting and fruitful. Heck, the number of times I should have a recorder with me for these sorts of chats is more tha...

Yesterday shortly after we posted the review about the StarWind iSCSI SAN software there was a press release by Starwind. The press release announced that they had passed the VMware Certification Program for VMware ESX 4.1 server. The press release can be found here. In short this means that the Starwind iSCSI SAN software has passed the [...] by Sander Martijn

Giving a quick shout out to our friends at Cisco – a heartfelt congratulations on Cisco’s incredible success entering the mature, stagnating server market and in just two years becoming the #3 player worldwide in x86 blade server factory revenue. By integrating compute, networking, and virtualization in a single platform with its Unified Computing System (UCS) blade server Cisco has prompted...

To accommodate the performance and reliability demands of today’s workloads, VMware vSphere provides advanced networking capabilities that form a robust foundation for private cloud computing. Two different vSwitches are provided in vSphere: Standard and Distributed.  Both offer NIC teaming for load balancing and fault tolerance, intuitive VLAN support, and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) ...

I’ve been running an Iomega IX4 in my home vSphere lab 24×7 for the past two years and have found it to be a nice reliable NAS device.  Though like with anything regular maintenance is required whether this be removing the dust or fluff from the fan at the back or keeping the firmware up-to-date.  The latter being the topic of this blog post. The Iomega IX2 or IX4 NAS has two...

Starwind passed the Lab tests by VMware to became Certified Partner. In my recent article about Starwind I reported that Starwind Free Version has got unlimited storages capacity – read here. In fact there is another interesting news about Starwind and it is that Starwind is now VMware Partner as a certified storage solution. Actually I was not aware that Starwind was not certified by VM...

Recently Starwind contacted us and asked if we would be interested in doing a review on their iSCSI SAN software solution. The enthusiasts that we are, we quickly replied that we would take the challenge. After some e-mails back and forth and setting up a small test lab we where ready to go. So what is [...] by Sander Martijn