Planet vSphere-land

vSphere 5 CBRC feature has been to certain extent discussed on the Internet and few bloggers have found and published some information about it. William Lam has published New Hidden CBRC (Content-Based Read Cache) Feature in vSphere 5 & for VMware View 5?, and also commented on the New vSphere VMware ESXi 5.0.0 GA VSISH Configurations. Few other posts describing CBRC have also surfaced, like...

How Storage Profiles works and what they are for? See in this video. In this video from VMware TV you’ll be able to learn about new feature in VMware vSphere 5 called Storage profiles and how to use them. Storage Profiles enable the creation of data stores that provide varying levels of service. You can categorize data stores based on system-defined user-defined levels of service. Syst...

The VMware Technical Journal is a new online publication. VMware is looking forward to producing future journal issues at regular intervals to highlight the R&D efforts taking place in several different areas of engineering. Their first issue includes papers related to distributed resource management, user experience monitoring, and statistics collection frameworks for virtualized envir...

This week I helped to answer a few questions about creating your own ESXi 5 bootable ISO along with automatically using a static IP Address when the custom ISO first boots up. Although all this information is available via the vSphere documentation, it may not always be easy to put all the pieces together and thought I share the steps for others to also benefit. You will need access to a UNIX/Li...

Last week I had the opportunity to sneak peak a new free tool made by VKernel named SearchMyVM Explorer. The tool is added to the vOPS Server Explorer tool and brings a long awaited and asked for feature designed to cut down time and effort in finding items in you virtual environment(s). It works very [...] by Edwin Weijdema

This past week I spent a few days at the VCE Marlboro offices doing some lab validation. One of the topics that comes up on a regular basis is the integration of the Nexus 1000v in the Vblock Platform with the constraints of VMware's vCloud Director integration. VMware has released a patch known as vCloud Director 1.5.1 that doesn't allude to any new features of the 1000v product. My goal for th...

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is the free vCenter plugin provided by EMC that extends the vCenter UI to add additional EMC-specific capabilities. We continue to invest in VSI based on what customers tell us they want…. In EMC VSI...

VMware is working on a new training course, it's still in early beta but it looks very promising. The training course is called VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [v5.0]. At the end of the course, you should be able to do the following: Configure and manage ESXi networking and storage for the large and sophisticated enterprise. Manage changes to the vSphere environment.
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I/O Analyzer v1.1 is now live on the Flings site: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/io-analyzer I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance tool for measuring storage performance. This version of I/O Analyzer adds the ability to run trace replay – a function which allows a user to replay an I/O trace that was captured elsewhere (with vscsistats) on the target test system. This version also has cool data ...

vCloud Director Fundamentals 1.5 – New Online Training from VMware. I already reported on CBT training recently released from TrainSignal. Now there is another training for vCD 1.5 from VMware. This new training introduced by VMware Education is called vCloud Director Fundamentals [1.5]. It’s an Online Self Paced Training which has six modules. Those modules covers Architecture an...

Version 3.6 of Login VSI - Login Virtual Session Indexer has been released. The tool has new release, which introduces a Client Side Performance Testing module. This new version enables performance tests of remoting protocols such as VMware PCoIP, Citrix ICA/HDX, Microsoft RDP, Quest EOP and others. It’s a a unique benchmarking tool to measure the performance and scalability of centrali...

I just received a note that the DR paper for vCloud Director is finally available in both epub / mobi format. So if you have an e-reader make sure to download this format as it will render a lot better then a generic PDF! Description: vCloud Director disaster recovery can be achieved through various scenarios and configurations. This case study focuses on a single scenario as a simple explanatio...

VCE, along with Cisco, EMC, and VMware, are doing a 13 City US tour they are calling next generation data center.   I will actually be participating in the Cincinnati, OH and Nashville, TN sessions and perhaps one or two more surprise appearances. These sessions will kick off with a very brief high level overview and be followed by a round table or panel discussion. You will get to hear where V...

The question of VMware’s future in the face of increasing competition is not a new one; it’s been batted around by quite a few folks. So Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ article “Does VMware Have a Real Future?” doesn’t really open any new doors or expose any new secrets that haven’t already been discussed elsewhere. What it does do, in my opinion, is show tha...

As we get down to the late hours of Q1, there’s the usual hum and activity. It’s an energizing time! Met with some GREAT customers today. Beyond that – our internal presales transformation continues (we’re holding off broadcasting updates until...

vOps Server Explorer and SearchMyVM improved in this Free product from vKernel. The free product from vKernel called vOps Server Explorer (formerly vKernel Explorer) has been just improved. The SearchMyVM product has been added into vOps Server Explorer to became 2 in 1 Free tool. The SearchMyVM’s  ”google like” searches helping administrators to easily find specific cluste...

A new feature in vCloud Director 1.5 is support for static routing. This provides the ability to route between network segments without the use of NAT and enables increased flexibility in implementing network connectivity within a vCloud environment. Though most networks will have a directly connected default gateway, it is possible for networks to have more than one router (such as multi...

I just finished reading a post on ZDNet titled “Are Hyper-V and App-V the new Windows Servers?” in which the author—Ken Hess—postulates that the rise of virtualization will shape the future of the Microsoft Windows OS such that, in his words: The Server OS itself is an application. It’s little more than (or hopefully a little less than) Server Core. The author also ...

Of course the title of this post was blatantly borrowed from the Scorpions (I do love the song) For the past 5 years I have designed, implemented and supported our corporate IT infrastructure. We have grown (sometimes too fast) and have established a solid and sound foundation for the ever-evolving market and business needs.The time has come for a new adventure and change of focus.Starting Mid-...

This is short and sweet, but something we spent almost two weeks trying to resolve.  The environment was setup using my documentation on Load Balancing Cells but the Remote console was not load balancing correctly.  It worked if one cell was removed from the pool but not if both were live in the load balancer.  As it turns out we saw the following error: 2012-03-26 09:43:10,470 | WARN �...

Free Conversion Tools to convert VHD, VMDK disk files. I was wondering on how many tools can be found to convert virtual hard disks files from VHD (Microsoft) into VMDK (VMware) and vice versa. Well, sort of. Because not all the tools here are able to do the conversion both ways… -:). Those tools, one day, or another, everyone needs. If you’re entreprise admin or IT consultant, it&...

We recently recorded a couple of Chad’s World episodes (always a surreal experience :-) - when/if (the “if” is because we kind of pushed the “reveal secrets” envelope and engineering may hunt us down) they air – will be awesome...

The end user computing landscape is evolving from an environment based primarily on personal computers running Windows applications to an environment where users: Move between endpoint devices during the work day (desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and cell phones) Expect to be able to stay connected to their professional and personal networks via mobile electronic devices Want ...

More information and the download is available here.

I greatly enjoyed the three or four Twin Cities vBeers I attended last summer, and one of the things on my list for 2012 was to start a regular vBeers in my hometown of Madison, WI. So I’m going to. If you are in the area on April 26th, 2012 please stop by and join us on the UW-Madison Memorial Union Terrace (Rathskeller if it’s raining/snowing), sometime after 4 PM. If you know some...