Planet vSphere-land

This is just a short survey so I am hoping all of you are willing to provide feedback about the use of vCenter Plugins. It will only take you two minutes max to fill out, only 6 questions! As VMware moves from the traditional desktop admin client, to the new Web Based client for vSphere administration, we’d like to get a feeling from you on which partner plug-ins are crucial for to make th...

Today I sat for the VMware Certified Professional 5 test since it was the last day before the “What’s New” class was going to be a requirement for the upgrade from VCP4. Hopefully I can give you a few pointers without violating any rules, based on my testing experience. From a VCP4 holders perspective here [...]

When installing vCloud Director in my homelab, I ran into an issue where the vCloud Director Agent cannot be installed into the ESXi host since the host is ran using VMware Auto Deploy. Installing that agent is useless because after a reboot, the ESXi host would be clean again. In vCloud Director you’ll be presented with an error during install: “The vCloud Director Agent version 1.5.0.45391...

How-to change default SSH port on ESXi 5 and make it persistent after reboots. If you want to keep SSH to your ESXi hosts, but want to change the default SSH port (22) to non default port, there is a way to do it. For example you don’t wan to have SSH on 22 but on 2222. How to do it? What’s the requirements? 01. You’ll have to create an XML file which needs to be placed on p...

Recently I had the pleasure of doing a guest post, called Finding your way in the PowerCLI Community, on the PowerCLI blog. The subject of the post was how to find community threads, that might hold an answer to your question. Now this wouldn’t be a PowerShell/PowerCLI blog, if I didn’t try to automate the procedure. And with a serious amount of RegEx involved, I was able to create s...

Introduction In this post I would like to propose the idea that VMware Zimbra Collaboration Server can serve as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange in Enterprise environments of all sizes. I would also propose that Zimbra is better suited for multi-tenant ISP deployments than Exchange. Let's discuss the pros and cons of Zimbra and give you the background to consider Zimbra for your next...

A couple of weeks ago Duncan Epping and I released a blog article that was an overview of Disaster Recovery for vCloud Director.  Today the follow-up more detailed whitepaper was released to VMware.com.  You can download the full whitepaper from the Tech Resources site on VMware.com.  The paper focusses on one use case to expand on the solution we presented in the original blog article and th...

A few weeks back I wrote an article on how to run Windows 8 Developer Preview on ESXi 5, which required a small trick to get working. Today, it looks like Microsoft just released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows 8 Server. For those looking to give these a try, you can do so by using vSphere 5.Disclaimer: VMware still does not officially support Windows 8 on vSphere, this is mainly for...

A white paper which I have worked on extensively has just been published. The case study takes a design / architecture approach and lists design considerations, requirements and assumptions throughout the document. I want to thank the people who worked with me on this document: Aidan Dalgleish, Frank Denneman, Matthew Northam, Venky Deshpande and Cormac Hogan. Below you can find more detailsR...

Today I decided to start testing the vBenchmark fling. It sounded like a cool tool so I installed it in my lab. You can find the fling here for those wanting to test it themselves. So what doe the tool do? The VMware Labs website summarizes it in a good way: Have you ever wondered how to quantify the benefits of virtualization to your management? If so, please consider using vBenchmark. vBenchma...

It looks like VMware Press are releasing sample snippets from my newly minted SRM 5.0 book. To be honest I didn’t know they were going to do this – but I think its a great way for them to dice-and-slice the book. Of course, the intention is teasing you into buying a copy, but in my book (if you forgive the pun) free content is something that is always handy. My hope ...

If you are familiar with the vCloud Director UI and have used the virtual console for a virtual machine, you may have noticed it is serviced by the VMRC (Virtual Machine Remote Console) vCD browser plugin which is only accessible in the vCD UI. If you are building a custom provisioning portal, you may want to provide similar functionality in your own portal for your users to access their VMs.&nb...

A little off topic for my blog but hey…. its my blog The other day my 6 year old daughter was at home with her Grandma and started writing some words onto a piece of paper, Grandma asked her if she was writing a book ?  From then on she was. Once she had finished she drew some pictures and showed us all, she did a fantastic job. Being the proud father that I am, I decided to make my daughter...

Be aware of those Sysprep limitations – drive letters changes and others When using sysprep in your organisation, you might be interested in Syprep Limitations. Yes, there are some. Hard Disk with multiple partitions – That’s one of those limitation of Sysprep. This is the problem with a VM which is being “sypreped”, but the VM’s virtual hard disk file has s...

The virtual machines in a vApp can connect to vApp networks (isolated or routed) and organization networks (direct or fenced). You can add networks of different types to a vApp to address multiple networking scenarios. Select the Networking tab in a vApp and select the Show networking details check box to view a list of the networks that are available to the vApp. Virtual machines in the vA...

Some interesting conversation around this topic came up during our Disaster Recovery for vCloud testing, and they also rang true when I visited the vCloud Director Bootcamp at Partner Exchange a few weeks ago.  The challenge has to do with how to deal with vApps that are getting IP Addresses from a Static IP Pool within vCloud Director.  In turn, what if those IP Addresses are part of a vShiel...

I would like to thank all of my readers who voted in the annual top virtualization blogs poll. It initially took a while to get Eric Siebert to add me to the vLaunchPad (Thanks Eric!), but I used my influence as one of his fellow Tech Field Day delegates during Tech Field Day 5 to convince him to add me to the list. I'm glad I did because this is how I found out about a lot of the virtualization...

Today I took and passed the VCP5 exam. I can’t say I passed with flying colours or in an exemplary manner. In fact I would say I scraped through. Why is that is what I’ve been thinking about, and what are the consequences has been on my mind since I saw the score. Anyway, before that let me talk about the test – without giving away any questions or answers. [A...

I’ve had multiple discussions around Resource Pool level shares in vCloud Director over the last 2 years so I figured I would write an article about it. A lot easier to point people to the article instead, and it also allows me to gather feedback on this topic. If you feel I am completely off, please comment… I am going to quote a question which was raised recently. One aspect of ...

On the VMware Labs pages you’ll find a number of great Lab projects, so called “Flings”. These are unsupported projects by VMware employees you can download and use. One of the latest VMware Lab Flings is the “Auto Deploy GUI”  created by Massimiliano Daneri which makes auto deploy of your ESXi hosts a breeze. As you probably know, VMware Auto Deploy is a new feature in vSphere 5 that...

This article originally appears in Tech OnTap – If you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to Tech OnTap.   NetApp recently published an update to our storage best practices for VMware® that highlights the new capabilities of VMware vSphere® 5 and NetApp® Data ONTAP® 8. This updated technical report (TR) covers a number of new capabilities... You can re...

Eric Siebert at vSphere-Land recently published the results for this year’s survey of the Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs. This year’s poll was expanded to include a number of new blogs & bloggers along with the addition of blog categories. I would like to thank everyone who supported the poll by voting and to... You can reas this blog at: http://virtualstorageguy.com/...

There are a number of factors fueling the need for greater adoption of desktop virtualization within every organization. The obvious is the consumerization of mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, Kindle Fires, Samsung Galaxys, etc. The proliferation of these devices has built a level of demand that requires the enterprise datacenter to enable the end... You can read this post at: http://v...

Eric Siebert (vSphere-Land) published the results for best VMware/Virtualization blog election yesterday. My blog finished in 17th place, coming down from the 39th position last year. On the category Favorite End User Computing Blog myvirtualcloud.net came 2nd, few points right behind Brian Madden. I consider this a major honor, and would like to thank everyone who voted for this one man blog. ...

A couple of weeks ago I asked that you vote for my blog on the vSphere-land Top Blog Contest, and now the results are in. Out of 187 blogs being voted on JPaul.me came in at number 49! Yup that’s right, I squeaked by and made the top 50! It’s pretty amazing to me what [...]