Planet vSphere-land

The newest member of my team at VMware just finished new hire orientation today, but there is still one more opportunity for a top-notch technologist.  This time I’m looking for a person that loves working with networking, virtualization, VMware vSphere, cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs. If you know that VXLAN offers a better approach to network virtualization than NVGRE and you liste...

Just to let everyone know that registrations are now open for the Carolina VMware User Summit. In case you don’t know it was really this VMUG and couple of the others that first got these big VMUG events started. I’ve attended every Carolina Summit since they started, but this year I’m taking a break. I think the folks down Carolina deserve a break from me ...

This year I have the opportunity to once again join a veritable “who’s who” in virtualization at the Carolinas VMUG Summit on May 15, 2012, in Charlotte, NC. (You can register for the event here.) There’s quite a line-up planned for this year: Morning keynote from Satyam Vaghani and Vinay Gaonkar of VMware on the past and future of VMware storage An afternoon keynote fro...

http://www.panologic.com/images/logo.png My very last “Vendorwag in the Valley” is with Zero Client specialists, PanoLogic. Pano System 5.0 includes everything you need to deploy virtual desktops on top of your VMware, Microsoft or Citrix virtualization platform. In one package and for one low price you get both our unique award-winning Pano Zero Client and the comprehensiv...

Something that was slipped into vCloud 1.5 that did not get much press was the idea on an elastic vDC. This gives the ability to add extra capacity to the underlying provider vDC in vCloud. If you have worked with vCloud before you might be saying wait I could always do this by expanding the size of my cluster or pool that was providing the resources. And this was certainly one option for adding...

I got an email today that talks about some of the Partner News going on in the VCE Community. The big part was that there is a new series on the Vblock 700LX which uses the VMAXe as part of the platform. VCE is continuing to expand its options for customers using everything we can out of VMware, Cisco, and EMC to build the best solutions possible. I navigated to the homepage where the courses ar...

After posting my article on running the Synergy server automatically on OS X Lion, a reader added a comment suggesting that it wasn’t recommended to use a shell script to launch a process via launchd. I haven’t been able to find any information to back up that recommendation, but I did create a new launchd property list file that doesn’t require (or use) a shell script to start...

I have had this question multiple times by now so I figured I would write a short blog post about it. The question is if you can share datastores across clusters with vSphere 5.0 and HA enabled. This question comes from the fact that HA has a new feature called “datastore heartbeating” and uses the datastore as a communication mechanism. The answer is short and sweet: Yes. For each c...

Well… Recording THIS Chad’s World episode was cool. We wanted to do a mega sneak peek at the next-generation hardware platforms the teams have been working on… We checked with Pat Gelsinger about whether he’d be willing to shine some...

New videos presenting Veeam One v. 6 Veeam has released the new version of Veeam One last week and today I found a new videos being available about the product. The first one is an overview video presented by Dough Hazelman, a Vice President, Product Strategy from Veeam Software, and the second one is a detailed video showing the “look and feel”. Since I like embedded video content...

By now you've probably heard that the final name of the version of Windows 8 that will run on ARM-based systems will be called "Windows RT." (I have no idea what the "RT" stands for or why there's no "8" in the name like the x86 versions.) Also you've...(read more)

The Free Microsoft’s Antivirus software got an update. I’m using this free software on my laptop since some time now, and I must say that it runs without hassles, pop-ups or something, without bothering me. I wrote a blog post about Microsoft Security Essentials here a couple of months back, where I discovered that software and started to use it. It’s an extremely lightweig...

I don’t know all the details, so it may not apply to everybody, but if you’re a SkyDrive user (or just have an account) you might be eligible for a free upgrade from 7 GB to 25 GB (I haven’t heard of anybody not being eligible, though). Log in to https://skydrive.live.com/ Click “Manage Storage” on the bottom of the left navigation column. Click the magic button to...

I’ve been waiting a couple of weeks for the updated vCloud (VCD) appliance to be released. Not sure if its out yet, but after getting tired of waiting. I just decided to update the VCD appliance myself. But after some googling I noticed that no one had written anything about upgrading the appliance. There are some excellent articles by Chris Collotti about how to upgrade vCloud in a produc...

Last week at Microsoft Management Summit 2012, attendees were directed to the “Microsoft Hosted Cloud Pavilion” for information on secure, enterprise-ready private clouds built on Windows and System Center. I spent some time talking to these hosting providers, expecting to hear about how they have System Center 2012 deployed and ready to integrate with App Controller for amazing Inf...

This question comes up a lot and only recently did I ask this of engineering and the answer is quite simple.  We all know that Preparing a host for vCloud Director essentially installs the vCloud Director Agent onto ESXi.  However, the secondary question that usually gets asked is, “What does the vCloud Director Agent actually do?”  I decided to ask that and I was also told I co...

This year at EMC World 2012 (being held once again in Las Vegas, NV), Spousetivities returns for their second year at EMC’s user conference. As usual, my wife Crystal—who founded and runs Spousetivities—has a great set of activities planned for any spouses, partners, family members, or friends that will be traveling with EMC World conference attendees. (EMC’ers: those of ...

Install Latest Linux Ubuntu with VMware Player. The easiest way of testing new linux distribution is by using the free VMware Player software. Get your for free at VMware’s website here. You don’t have to mess out with your own system by having to setup a multiboot environment, where Windows and linux share the same hard drive and the boot sector get usually modified/replaced by Gr...

I don’t like the idea of new year’s resolutions much, but I do like setting goals for myself. One of my goals this year has been to stop saying certain pointless phrases, like “to be honest.” In the process I’ve found myself becoming very aware of the other dumb things people say, too. Here are my top five. “To be honest.” You’ve been dishonest wit...

Few weeks back I saw Scott Davis, CTO for End User Computing at VMware (@shd_9) demonstrating an interesting application that manages X-Rays and MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) using 3D technology over PCoIP. It wasn’t the first time I had seen PCoIP delivering lossless images, as this is one of the key attributes of Teradici’s protocol. However with this applications and the help of a...

VMware is holding an “End User Computing Virtual Conference” next week. Here’s the text of the announcement/invitation that I saw (and yes, I made sure that VMware was OK with me posting it here so that others could attend if interested): Please join VMware as we discuss the next step forward in end-user computing for the post-PC era. Watch Vittorio Viarengo, VP of End-User C...

I wrote this last year but never published, working on clearing out some old posts. Along with the long list of other features added to vSphere 5, VMware has included a new version of VMFS. The upgrade in VMFS brings us to version 5 of the file system. The main focus of VMware while creating VMFS seems to be making it easier to manage storage in virtual environments. In VMFS-5 the number of stor...

Been fighting some problems with VMware Auto Deploy lately which turned out to be an easy to solve issue. I installed the first host in the cluster, which would NOT be deployed with Auto Deploy but had a local hard disk in it. Configured it the way I like it, set all the logging and network coredump location to be the vCenter host and then created a host profile. The network configuration consis...

This paper provides an overview of how to enable vmknicbased software iSCSI multipathing, as well as the procedure by which to verify port binding configuration.http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-multipathing-configuration-software-iSCSI-port-binding.pdf Configuring vmknic-based multipathing for the software iSCSI adapter will help vSphere users enable failover at the pa...

The objective of this white paper is to provide information on storage protocols and how they interoperate with  VMware vSphere and related features. Not all supported storage protocols are discussed. Some notable  exceptions are ATA over Ethernet (AoE) and shared/switched SAS. However, the protocols that are included in  this paper are the ones that VMware i...