Planet vSphere-land

The good folks over at Iomega have agreed to provide TechHead readers (UK only at this stage – watch this space for other countries) with a generous 20% discount off of their new Iomega PX series NAS devices from the 1st July until the 1st September.  I’m a big fan of both the Iomega IX and PX series storage devices as they are ideal for my VMware vSphere lab environment, of course t...

On July 6, 2011 Train Signal will launch a new VMware View Administration course that covers the VMware Certified Associate – Desktop (VCA-DT) certification from VMware. This course by VCA-DT, VCP, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, and vExpert Brian Knudtson is delivered in online streaming video as well as DVD format for offline learning (even on your iPad or in the car). Watch the sample from the new ...

VMware Zimbra for Android is a latest Fling! A new application for Android users – Zimbra for Android. VMware’s Collaborative suite Zimbra can be installed on small smartphone or a tablet device which runs Android OS now. The news comes from @vmwarelabs. I even found a video on YouTube where you can see not only the Installation process, but also the configuration and some good ho...

VMware Zimbra for Android (VZA) is a native Android collaboration application that allows you to access your email, calendar, contacts, tasks and files from any Android device, specifically smartphones and tablets.VZA supports any Microsoft ActiveSync compliant email server and also supports the VMware Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). With ZCS as the backend, VZA offers several additional ...

If you are lucky enough to have an EMC backed virtual environment to work with; did you know that you can test drive PowerPath Virtual Edition (VE) for free? Go over to: https://community.emc.com/message/11590 and signup for a free 45 day trial. This of course requires you use ISCSI or Fibre (i.e. block storage) with either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. But, if you have always been curiou...

David Davis of www.vmwarevideos.com has released his video of the “Ask The Experts Panel” on the topic of cloud. On the panel were myself and Scott Lowe, VCDX (@Scott_Lowe) of blog.ScottLowe.org Jason Nash, VCDX (@nash_j) of  jasonnash.wordpress.com Mike DiPetrillo, VCDX (@mikedipetrillo) of www.mikedipetrillo.com Moderator: Rich Brambley, vPower (@rbrambley) of www.VMetc.com A...

StarWind Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) has been announced by Starwind Software. New product announcement from Starwind software. Starwind SAN is known to be usually installed on Windows systems. I covered several times on my website the configuration steps and different possibilities. Recently Starwind announced Free version of Starwind SAN too. So how about a Virtual SAN Appliance? With VSA you...

Well, the dust has settled – or rather I’ve been so max’d out that I haven’t had time to write up my experiences. And I really should before it gets all fuzzy, like afternoon beer… This TFD was in Boston, and virtualization focused. I was joined by a group other Merry Pranksters. Ed Czerwin, vSoup and vNinja, @ECzerwin Chris Dearden, J.F.V.I. and vSoup, @ChrisDe...

The “Ask the Expert” session at the Carolina VMUG was awesome this year (2011). Experts on the panel were: Scott Lowe, VCDX (@Scott_Lowe) of blog.ScottLowe.org Jason Nash, VCDX (@nash_j) of  jasonnash.wordpress.com Mike DiPetrillo, Senior vCloud Architect (@mikedipetrillo) of www.mikedipetrillo.com Mike Laverick, VCP & all around vGuru (@Mike_Laverick) of www.RTFM-ed.co.uk &#...

In my new job I meet many, many vendors and almost all of them have a partner program in which we can achieve bronze, silver, gold, enterprise, premier, business or any other partner status. In reality the meaning of the term ‘Partner’ is interpreted in many different ways. According to Wiki, a business partner is: [...] by Erik Scholten

First, let me say why I wanted to add SSD to the MBP. I’ve been a McUser for just over year. Generally, I love it. But lately the rainbow circle of hell has been coming up more often than would like – and the once boot time has become slow. So for me the performance was the key reason. What also triggered my decision was that there is a new version of Mac OS X (Lion) on its way, and ...

First, let me say why I wanted to add SSD to the MBP. I’ve been a McUser for just over year. Generally, I love it. But lately the rainbow circle of hell has been coming up more often than would like – and the once boot time has become slow. So for me the performance was the key reason. What also triggered my decision was that there is a new version of Mac OS X (Lion) on its way, and ...

Congratulations to Kirk Shaffer – he wins the $15 iToons Gift card. Kevin is a 27 year old Network Analyst for a large Health Care provider in Pennsylvania. Where he supports the VMware infrastructure composed of ESXi, SRM, CapIQ, and View running on HP blades. They are currently 60% Virtualized with 80 Hosts and 1300 VM’s.  He’s been working with vmware for about 2 and a hal...

I had a chance to get a copy of the newest VMware vSphere Performance Monitoring Training from TrainSignal. This new training from Trainsignal which I blogged about already in my previous article here has got 40 lessons. I think that never ever I saw a training with so many lessons included. As usually it comes with VMW, iPOD and MP3 files on the 3rd DVD so you can listen/watch while on the ro...

Just a quick post to let you know, if you haven’t already seen, that v1.1.0 of VMware’s vSphere iPad application has been released and is now available for download/update on the Apple App Store.  This update to the iPad app is about bug fixes, providing a few tweaks and adding a handful of minor (though good to have) improvements.  One important point of note is that this new v...

I'm blogging live from the Denver VMUG event, and I must say, the vibe here is one of the strongest I've felt at a regional event in quite a while.  There is an all-star cast of characters including (but not limited to) Eric Siebert, Scott Lowe, John Troyer, and Andi Mann.  I had the morning keynote slot to kick off the event after a great introduction by John Troyer.  I even managed to unvei...

I have moved a new vApp I am building to Ubuntu 11.04 this last week. I had been coding via SSH for the most part. But just recently I noticed that I have been getting a blank console on the vApp. Turns out that doing a kernel upgrade early in the process made a setting in grub that gives a slick look to the boot process not work. This is a Ubuntu bug with an easy fix: Get into the VM (using SSH...

2 Men, 2 Sessions, 1 CLI is a post from: Virtu-Al. Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration" Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Diskeeper Corporation reached out to me via email last week letting me know that they’ve released a new white paper on optimizing VMs.  I’m making the three page document available for download via the following link: Best Practice Protocols: Optimization of VMware Systems (416KB) Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents ...

The 12th of July there will be an important announcement made by VMware. There are events, and there are events. This one I guess is the one not to miss. Usually when I’m trying to attend webminars or online meetings I’m struggling with timezones and usually the meeting does not fit for my timezone, so I’m happy if the vendor or parnter provides an option to download the onli...

It’s been a little later than I’d hoped in announcing the winners of the TrainSignal ‘Best of vSphere 4.1 for vNerds’ training DVD due to being away on holiday, though I’m back now and it’s time to announce the winners. Hurray! First of all thanks to everyone who made the effort to submit a photo, including Christian (@H0bbel) who sent through a photo and didn’t even want to ent...

The question about the fault.RestrictedVersion.summary error message comes up pretty often on the VMTN community forums, specifically for new users of VMware vSphere. This particular error message is usually generated when trying to use one of the VMware SDK toolkits such as the vCLI, PowerCLI, VI Java, etc. or directly interfacing with the vSphere API for automation. The reason for this error...

VMware ESXi is mainstream.  If you’ve ever deployed a VMware vMA appliance to manage ESXi (or heck, even ESX for that matter), you may have noticed the enforcement of a complex password policy for the vi-admin account.  For example, setting a password of password is denied because it is based on a dictionary word (in addition to other morally obvious reasons). However, you can bend the ...

Sometimes a solution to a problem is just staring you in the face. While writing the PowerCLI book, I spent quite a bit of time on how to find which user acknowledged an alarm. Today Eric “Scoop” Sloof launched the same question on Twitter. While I thought it was not possible, based on my past investigations, I decided to have a second look. And of course now I found in a matter of m...