Planet vSphere-land

[The following is piece I wrote recently for TechTarget. Sadly, I rather dropped the ball on the brief, and it didn't make the "cut". It was meant to be technical tip, but quickly became an opinion piece about the current economy uncertainty we are facing - and its impact or not on the world of virtualization. Sorry about the title. Generally I can't abide this fashion for putting software versi...

Awhile back I discovered an undocumented flag called "esxvm" in the SQL statements of the new vCloud Director 1.5 installer that suggested the possibility of deploying nested ESXi hosts in vCD. However, after further investigation the flag only enables the automated deployment of an ESXi 5 parameter (vhv.allow) which is required to run nested ESXi 4.x/5.x hosts as part of preparing a new ESXi...

One of the best and one of my favorite ideas from the PowerCLI team (there are so many to choose from) was to include an initialization script when you launch PowerCLI, this gives us the nice black background, custom prompt and also other things like the Get-VICommand function. Get-VICommand lists all the VMware related cmdlets added to your session, this is useful for quickly listing the VMware...

Unpublished :  VMworld Copenhagen 2011. With more than a week delay (sorry about that) I had this photo taken by the Starwind’s Booth, which haven’t been published. I stopped by at the Starwind’s booth at the VMworld Copenhagen 2011 to get some fresh news about Starwind, what is coming etc.. In fact the news has been around since few months, that Starwind does prepare The St...

The folks over at Servers Plus are running a rather good competition which allows for people to use their imagination and come up with a creative funky design for the case of a new HP Proliant Microserver.  Once all the submissions have been entered (by Friday 11th November) public voting will then take place with the creator of the winning design having their very own design created an...

Well, it feels like Copenhagen was many weeks ago – so much can be happen in a single week! With that said its only two weeks ago that I was checking into my hotel near the Bella wondering where the hell I left my iPhone. I want to draw your attention to some TechTarget content out there which maybe of interest to folks who attended or didn’t for that matter. Some of it is pre-VMwo...

This week see’s the first ever UK VMware Users Conference.  Although here in the UK we have a couple of regional (ie: Northern and Southern) VMUGs this is the first large scale national VMware Users Conference to take place.  As you’d imagine there are a number of useful and informative sessions being offered from the likes of Duncan Epping and Lee Dillworth along with many othe...

Maintenance release ESXi 4.1 U2 with some new features too. Even if vSphere 5 has been released more than 2 months ago and brought up more than 150 new features, the ESXi 4.1 got a face lift with this new update from VMware. This second update is mainly maintenance release, but new features has been introduced as well. Some new CPU supports has been announced as well. The new Supported CPUR...

Today Rob de Veij released an update of his excellent tool called RVTools. We are up to version 3.2 already. You can find the update on the RVTools website. RVTools is an essential tool for every vSphere Admin. It allows you to report on the most important aspects of your virtual infrastructure, but probably the most important ones are limits / reservations / VMware tools. Seriously give it a tr...

This funny video comes from vKernel. Everyone knows that Zombie VMs, which are not optimized or oversubscribed VMs, and which performance sucks valuable resources from your virtual infrastructure are a bad friends. Those VMs runs quietly in your infrastructure and are quite happy to live there. But seeing the resources that you disposes shrink like the snow on the sun makes you think about it....

I had this post sitting in my “Draft” box for a week and didn’t notice it never got published. Although a bit late here it is. At VMworld Copenhagen I tried to spot a whole bunch of rockstar Bloggers / Tweeps. I tweeted their pics during the show but I figured not everyone of you is online all of the time so I thought I would post them here as well. Note that they didn’t ...

You learned about VMware Auto Deploy’s benefits in part one of our two-part series, but it’s also important to know the vSphere 5 feature’s nuts and bolts and how to set it up for customers. Auto Deploy takes advantage of the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot feature that is present in many physical network interface cards (NICs). This allows a server to boot from a remo...

Although creating new hosts is a common server virtualization task, it is also a tedious process. Solution providers can use VMware Auto Deploy for vSphere 5 to do it much more efficiently. Installing single hosts isn’t hard for solution providers but configuring multiple hosts can be time consuming. A VAR that has to create a new vSphere host without VMware Auto Deploy typically has to do...

The release of VMware Inc.’s vSphere 5 brings many exciting new features and enhancements to the virtualization platform, especially when it comes to storage. Two of the biggest new features in that area are Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Profile-Driven Storage, which provide some much-needed control over storage resources. In previous versions of vSphere, Distributed Res...

VMware is working on a new training which will be released in the next months. It’s called VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud. This course demonstrates to technical personnel how to deploy VMware vCloud for a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment and manage the on-going operation of the deployment. The course focuses on the private and public vCloud solutions but als...

The 1st of December see’s the Scottish VMUG meet yet again. It kicks of here: 13:00 – 17:00 The Scotsman Hotel – Russell Suite 20 North Bridge, EH1 1TR Edinburgh, Scotland… They have their agenda up – which includes my good friend Cormac Hogan. If you think VMUGs are all about “vendor pitches” – think again. This guy will technically rock-your-world. ...

I was listening to some VMworld talks during the weekend and something caught my attention which I hadn’t realized before. The talk I was listening to was VSP2122″VMware vMotion in vSphere 5.0, Architecture and Performance”. Now this probably doesn’t apply to most of the people reading this so let me set the scenario first: Different hosts from a CPU/Memory perspective i...

VMware Partnering with Nvidia. This is great news for people willing to do some high demand 3D graphics work done by using a Virtual Macines. In fact, VMware has announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia. The partnership between NVIDIA and VMware will enable high quality graphics being delivered to virtual desktops in VMware View 5 and application platforms based on the future AppBlast pro...

As I sit here working on an SRM lab, VUM just sent an email to me reporting 28 new patches for ESX(i) 4.1 including the release of 4.1 Update 2. What’s New The VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Update 2 release offers the following improvements: Support for new processors: vCenter Server 4.1 Update 2 supports hosts with processors on AMD Opteron 6200 series (Interlagos) and AMD Opteron 4200 serie...

For the first time ever there will be a UK wide VMUG and I have to say the organisers have certainly made sure it will be one that is not to be forgotten.  With VMware super stars like Duncan Epping, Lee Dilworth and Cormac Hogan being flown in to give some great sessions and the usual UK crowd it should be a great event. Also available throughout the day will be a PowerCLI Hands on Lab, come t...

How-to Get rid of the “System Logging is not configured on ESXi host” message Usually when it happens is just after a fresh installation on an ESXi 5 host without Direct Attached Storage (DAS). When you’re running your ESXi 5 server from an USB Flash drive like me in my lab, you might want to configure the destination of syslog messages, otherwise you’ll have a message ...

Foglight Network Management System (NMS) is an enterprise ready network performance monitoring and configuration management solution. It installs in less than 15 minutes and auto-discovers key metrics for network resources, including hardware, operating systems, virtual infrastructure, databases, middleware, applications, and services allowing you to: - Reduce the wasted time and chaos ass...

Last week at VMworld and on the VMTN community I had a couple of questions around resource management and HA Admission Control. It appears people were using HA Admission Control for managing resources within their environment. In other words, the amount of VMs that HA would allow you to restart would be leading for managing resources. But is that what you should do? If you look at how HA works a...

How to Convert VMware Workstation Teams from earlier version of Workstation. I just stumbled on this by browsing the Online documentation of VMware Workstation 8. For those of you who were using Teams (or still using), it’s good to know that it’s possible to convert them into new version of VMware Workstation after you upgrade to the latest version. As you might already knew, the t...

vCenter Infrastructure Navigator automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources. It's a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. vCenter Infrastructure Navigator enables application-aware management of infrastructure and operations to better understand the im...