Planet vSphere-land

This week Veeam released their latest version of their Backup & Replication software “Veeam Backup & Replication v6“. With their latest release they offer enhanced scalability and performance. They also add support for Microsoft Hyper-V so you can protect your multi-hypervisor environment with only one product, from a single console. New features in version 6 [...] by Sander ...

Veeam just announced their new Backup & Replication version 6 that supports both Hyper-V and vSphere. Recently, Veeam’s Doug Hazleman (@VMDoug), VP of Product Strategy and Anton Gostev (@gostev), Director of Product Management, did a webinar on the new version 6. I am lucky enough to be able to offer a portion of that webinar below. This video from the webinar covers how version 6 supp...

Note: I’ve posted a follow-up to this article with some corrected information. Please read here. I’ve been doing quite a bit of networking-related reading over the last few weeks, and VXLAN has been a key topic of this networking-related reading (along with OTV, MPLS, and OpenFlow). Since VXLAN’s announcement at VMworld US 2011, there have been some pretty good articles written...

After I posted my article yesterday Jason Boche posted a comment about the reboot that was required according to the screenshot. I looked in to it and quickly realized that if I would alter my “descriptor.xml” I would not get this message. In other words, it depends on the package that is installed if a reboot is required or not, in my case I made the following simple changes to inst...

VMware KB - vCloud Director 1.5 and stretched cluster architectures This VMware KB article provides a couple of possible vCloud Director use cases with stretched clusters.

When I joined Tech Marketing in February of this year my first task literally was the ESX System Analyzer. I was part of the team who developed the specs and test the app, but the main driving force behind the tool was my colleague Kyle Gleed (@VMwareESXi). The tool / fling was designed specifically to help people migrate from ESX to ESXi and to smoothen the transition especially in those enviro...

Upgrading to ESXi 5.0 – which way to go in which situation There are several different methods on when it comes to upgrading to the latest ESXi 5.0. There are also different situations, which you might consider, before upgrading. First, are you upgrading 3 ESXi or 30….. or even more… Which method to choose? For smaller number of hosts you can use the interactive upgrade metho...

The ESX System Analyzer is a tool designed to help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi. It analyzes the ESX hosts in your environment and, for each host, collects information on factors that pertain to the migration process:• Hardware compatibility with ESXi• VMs registered on the ESX host, as well as VMs located on the host’s local disk• Modifications to the Service Co...

During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update. It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the [...] by Erik Scholten

** Be warned, this is totally unsupported. Only for educational purposes should this be used ** Today I was asked the question on how to create a VIB file (.vib). In our documentation it is mentioned that you can create a VIB file to add firewall rules to your ESXi host. As the .vib tool is not available yet to the general public I decided to dig in to it. I want to stress that I tested this in ...

One of the features added in vSphere 5 was a software FCoE initiator. This is a feature that has gotten relatively little attention, other than a brief mention here and there. I’m not entirely sure why the software FCoE initiator in vSphere 5 hasn’t gotten more attention, but this past week I had the opportunity to work with the software FCoE initiator in a bit more detail. In this p...

New video on VMware Tech Channel shows what is vCLI for. In this video you’ll see the structure of vCLI commands and how to get started with vCLI. In addition there is a free poster download as a bonus at the VMware Website. In this video it’s Tasnim Fidali – Senior Technical Writer from VMware will introduce you to basic structure of vCLI and what vCLI commands are for. You&...

Viktor van den Berg is ramping up. He has presented a great line-up of speakers who are going to deliver the most awesome sessions at the Dutch VMUG event. If you didn’t register yet, there's still a chance. Make sure you mark the 9th of December in your agenda. More information can be found here.Here’s the list with the celebrities:• Alan Renouf, Se...

Storage is the slowest and most complex host resource, and when bottlenecks occur, they can bring your virtual machines (VMs) to a crawl. In a VMware environment, Storage I/O Control provides much needed control of storage I/O and should be used to ensure that the performance of your critical VMs are not affected by VMs from other hosts when there is contention for I/O resources. Storage I/O Con...

Sometimes the path to learn something means using very different tools along the way. In my case, I have been learning more on the developing virtual network world along with some of the new DevOps toolsets popping up. As part of this I have started using KVM as a hypervisor on an Ubuntu 11.10 platform in a portion of my home lab. I have learned quickly that getting something simple done in vSph...

Here is another preview of the upcoming vSphere 5 vReference Card – the vCenter section.  I’d love to hear your feedback, as I’m likely to drop anything I can’t be sure is absolutely correct. Anything still in grey are areas I’ve not been able to confirm that they are still valid with vCenter 5. Just drop your comments below or catch me on twitter (@forbesguthrie)....

I finally got a chance to finish up the documentation on some of the new feature enhancements and bug fixes for both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCB-restore this weekend. One of the biggest change is both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCB-restore are now bundled together and ghettoVCB-restore is now being version controlled on github just like ghettoVCB. This has been on the backlog for awhile and I am sorry it t...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #17, another of my irregularly-scheduled collections of various data center technology-related links, thoughts, and comments. Here’s hoping you find something useful! Networking I think it was J Metz of Cisco that posted this to Twitter, but this is a good reference to the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules. I’ve spoken quite a bit about stretched c...

Find what’s new in Veeam Backup & Replication v 6.0 The upcoming Veeam Backup and Replication v. 6.0 which will be released very soon, brings some big changes at the architecture level. You might be wondering what is new? I was covering in my blog post the beta release from VMworld Copenhagen 2011 this year. But that was just a fraction of what’s announced. In fact the new Veea...

Every year it becomes more obvious that we are moving to a world based on software-as-a-service. That our high processing desktop and notebook computers will go to the trash heap seems to be a forgone conclusion. Steve Jobs calls this the “post PC era”. Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod followed suit at VMworld 2011 by agreeing with Jobs and further nudging users towards a device-independ...

I’ve met Jeff last week in Oslo (Norway) where he was delivering a Cisco UCS training while I was teaching the VMware vSphere 5 Install, Configure and Manage course. During one of the dark Nordic evenings, we went out for dinner. We had some great hamburgers and I offered him a taste of my homemade sambal The ice was broken and we had some pretty good laughs that evening.Jeff works as a ...

As of today, the software-as-a-service solution opvizor for analyzing and rectifying configuration, performance and security errors in virtualized environments is available on the market in Version 1.5. The new version’s architecture has been optimized in particular for medium-sized and large virtualized infrastructures. This is coupled with improvements in performance, disguising, in rep...

As multiple people asked for it, Frank and I decided to also put the 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive on sale. Just wanted to inform you guys about it. Here are the links: US – ebook – vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive – $ 4.99 UK - ebook – vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive – £ 3.99 FR - ebook – vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive – € 3.99 DE - ebook – vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS De...

I assume you follow Duncan and Frank and read their blogs, but in case you don’t, check out this Crazy Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal!  Between now and Monday 11:59pm PST, prices are slashed on Frank and Duncan’s ebook vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive. The sale pricing is as follows: US – ebook – $ 4.99 UK – ebook – £ 3.99 DE – ebook – € 3.99 FR – ebook –...

We are long time fascinated by the whole Black Friday and Cyber Monday craze in the USA. Unfortunately we do not celebrate Thanksgiving in the Netherlands and none of the shops are participating in something similar as Black Friday. This year we thought it was a great idea to participate in some form and what better than to offer our vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive e-book for a price you...