Planet vSphere-land

A flexible PXE infrastructure can be a real force multiplier in your technology arsenal.  Fully-automated installs are great time-savers, but there is also value in being able to perform an interactive (manual) install of VMware ESXi, Linux, or Windows over the network.  Physical installation media is becoming less and less viable in this day of lights-out datacenters, and virtual media capabi...

The ability to enable virtual Fault Tolerance in nested virtual machines running in vESX(i) is not a new feature in vSphere 5, vFT has been an unsupported feature since vSphere 4 and was initially identified by Simon Gallagher. The process is exactly the same in vSphere 5 in which three virtual machine configuration options need to be configured for the virtual machine to be enabled with FT, not...

30% Off: New promo for VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation This new promo code works for VMware Fusion 3.1 and for VMware Workstation 7.1. In addition, if you buy VMware Fusion with an subscription for 12 months, you can benefit an automatic update to next major release. VMware Fusion 3.1 plus Subscription — Protect your investment and receive major version releases launched during your 12-...

Last few weeks a lot of talk has been about the new VMware licensing for vSphere 5. Many reported how this would work against VMware’s principle of running as many VMs on one host as possible. After the dust had settled, people started checking their own situations and found that things weren’t as bad as they looked in the first place but for some the new licensing policy would still mean a ...

Here is a collection of all my blog posts relating to vSphere 5 that I have worked on over the last 6 months.General Topics1. How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5 2. Automating ESXi 5.x Kickstart Tips & Tricks3. Major Enhancements in esxcli for vSphere 54. What's New in VMware Vsish for ESXi 55. SSH Keys & Lockdown Mode Caveat in ESXi 56. How to Create Cu...

The vSphere Health Check script has now been updated to support vSphere 5.0 and includes the following new features:vCenter Server Instance UUIDvCenter hostnameStorage DRS Configuration (Maintenance Mode, Stats Aggregation, Stats Collection for Datastores)FDM/HA Heartbeat Policy + DatastoreFDM/HA StateHost Agent SettingsHost New iSCSI Configuration/InformationHost FCoE HBAsHost Source Packages f...

vMA 5 is just one of the latest VMware virtual appliances that have received the blessings and conversion to VMware's standard virtual appliance OS, SUSE. There have been several changes in the latest version of vMA and here are just a few tips and tricks that can help get you going with this new OS1. The increase password complexity is something you may notice when you first configure...

Nice promo which has been announced by VMware. There has been a new announce from VMware which might save some money on trainings, if planned ahead. With this promo you can benefit 50% off for the second training when you register before the August 31. See the public catalog here.  Or search the course by location. You can even give the promo code to your colleague or co-worker so he can bene...

VMware in collaboration with Teradici is working hard to improve the rich user experience even more by adding new features and improving existing ones. The vDesktops running on VMware View can be reached through lots of different devices including Apple iPads or Android-based tablets. The VDI solutions on the market are getting more and more [...] by Edwin Weijdema

I've recorded a video which will show you the new vSphere 5 iSCSI UI support and some other usability improvements. In vSphere 5 you'll have the ability to configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations.If you use ...

I had a question on my old VMFS LUN Sizing article I did back in 2009… The question was how valid the used formula and values still were in today’s environment especially considering VMFS-5 is around the corner. It is a very valid question so I decided to take my previous article and rewrite it. Now one thing to keep in mind though is that I tried to make it usable for generic consum...

A great new feature of vSphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3.0 was hip, we would all install ESX on the local harddisk (or SAN disk). With ESX 3.5, the first ESXi version was released but only few were using it. With 4.x ESXi really got a large install base and more and more people were moving to installing ESXi on USB or SD card. Now with vSphere 5 a...

vCenter deployments are likely to change for large companies as they upgrade to vSphere 5.  Traditionally vCenter has been installed in one of two designs.  The primary decision was whether to split off the database onto a second server.  Smaller shops simply installed vCenter and MS SQL (or even MS SQL Express for the very small) on the same server. Medium and large organisations commonly ...

A sessions from VMworld 2010 were enabled for free watch. It’s been announced by VMworld blog. The session from last year’s VMworld are no longer restricted. VMworld sessions are video sessions from the presentations at VMworld. If you never attend VMworld before, this might be a good occasion to have a look what’s it looks like. Or if you don’t plan to attend, you can ...

If I told you that I could do something to make your most mission critical app: Perform better. Cost less. Have higher overall availaiblity. …you would either: A) assume I’m a vendor trying to sell you something and write it off as such; b) assume I’ve made an error – and ignore my advice; c) investigate, and if you agree, you would consider that deployment model for the a...

ESXi 5.0 now supports a new feature called Host Cache which allows a user to offload the virtual machine's swap onto a local SSD device for performance, this can be very helpful for VMware View deployments or other VDI type deployments on vSphere 5.Currently this is a manual process in which a VMFS volume must be created on an local SSD device and then configured to be used as a Host Cache datas...

Continuing from New vSphere 5 CLI Utilities/Tricks Marketing Did Not Tell You About Part 215. Another way to run dcui utility is using the dcuiweasel, I'm not exactly sure what the difference between this and dcui utility, but I suspect it has something to do with weasel also loaded.16. You can run gdbserver for debugging processes, I suspect this maybe for VMware engineers/s...

When doing some research for the vSphere Clustering Technical Deepdive book I stumbled across something which was very surprising and difficult to grasp at first. I figured explaining it in a short article was the best approach. Many of  you have read the HA deepdive article or the book and know that das.failuredetectiontime is probably the most commonly used advanced setting when configuring H...

CloudFS is a prototype replicated and distributed storage system for the VMware ESX platform. It allows VMs to run using local storage, without any single points of failure. CloudFS has been described in the research papers "Lithium: Virtual Machine Storage for the Cloud" at SoCC 2010 in Indianapolis, and "Scalable virtual machine storage using local disks" in the Decemb...

I was recently going through the new vSphere 5 API reference guide and I had stumbled across two new interesting virtual machine features that I did not see any mention of in the vSphere 5 beta documentation.The first feature is the support for a new e1000e virtual ethernet adapter which provides support for PCI-Express adapters. This is a new virtual device type that has been added in vSphere 5...

This year at VMworld I have the extreme honor to be moderating a panel discussion with some fellow bloggers that in my opinion are experts in virtualization, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac. For those of you attending VMworld be sure to register for VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers today! So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have ...

We’re just at a month to go until VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, NV and the official countdown has started within the vSpecialist compound! Boy do we have a lot of great things that we’re going to show you this year, face-melting awesome-sauce things. Join Chad Sakac (@sakacc) tomorrow morning (Thursday 7/28 at 8:00am PT) as he gives a sneak peak of the latest technology integrations, e...

No Earth-shattering material tonight.  In fact this tip isn’t even VMware/virtualization related other than the fact that the problem came up while working in the lab.  It has been several months since the last article I wrote under the “General” category which contains no VMware/virtualization content. Anyway, I was working in the lab when… My Windows 7 OS would no lon...

Great news.  Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) is getting ready to release a new version of his highly successful Mastering vSphere book. The previous version – Mastering VMware vSphere 4 - is probably the single most popular vSphere 4 book published, and for good reason.   It was the base material used by both new users and established ESX administrators to get up to speed with vSphere 4 as so...

For the first time in my life, I got turn left when board a plane. I actually turned right in attempt to locate my seat not realising I’d been upgrade to First Class on an internal flight. OK. It’s hardly business or 1st on a transatlantic. But I took a photo to record the strange and wonderful experience – I hope to get more of this treatment from United Airlines in the future. One day ...