Planet V12n

When you update your Onboard Administrator on HP c-Chassis to 2.5x, the OA will start to check if the Power Management version is new enough and if it is not it will give you a Major Error with details of : C01668472 To update this you need to either have a running OS or you can [...]

Yesterday the VMware Partner Exchange 2010 kicked off. For those of you unfamiliar with VMware Partner Exchange, or PEX, it is the annual virtualization event designed especially for VMware Partners focused on partner education and enablement. This year's event is...

If you’re a server admin, think how many times and how long each of the following 25 activities takes you and your team.  You infrastructure might be 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000 servers. They say the way to get a job done most efficiently is to give it to a lazy person.  When I was [...] Related…

When it comes to administering and designing a virtualized infrastructure, storage is one of the cornerstones of a successful design.

Here's a simple script which will map a drive within a ThinApp packaged app, then unmap the drive when the app closes.

Later this month I’m presenting at an event on changes to the IT department and I’m going to focus on the collapse of the silos, or division of labour, in IT. As part of my research I have one eye on the current state of IT silos and the other eye on the theories of Karl [...] No related…

This just in! The dates and location for VMworld 2010 have been set, so mark it on your calendars. If you didn’t make it to VMworld 2009 in San Francisco or VMworld 2009 Europe, you don’t want to miss this one. The event will return to the  Moscone Center in San Francisco from August [...]

Today VMware organized the vForum 2010 in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, and during this day Dutch VMUG-er Viktor van den Berg interviewed Richard Garsthagen. Richard is one of the organizers of VMworld and during this interview he revealed some news about VMWorld 2010. First of all VMworld 2010 USA will…

Train Signal  the video training company have added a new title to their catalogue today the VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Vol 1. Aimed at vSphere admins to help improve you skill set, Volume 1 includes VMware View, ThinApp, Nexus 1000v and PowerCLI. With Virtual Desktops being on many…

Today I attended the VMware Virtualization Forum event in Nijkerk. It’s a free, interactive full day event where you could learn about virtual infrastructure from experts and industry analysts. I’ve met some good old friends and had a lot of fun. I’ve made some pictures and recorded a 15…

For those that have been waiting for Veeam fast SCP to support Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 your wait is now over. With the new update 3.02 Fast SCP now supports both of these operating systems. For me this has been on of the tools I have really missed having on my laptop since [...]

An interesting question was raised in the PowerCLI community by Jörn. He wanted to find all the guests that had been powered off for more than a week. Before you tackle such a request, it is useful to sit down and think a bit about the solution. If you are going to search through all the [...]…

This session is titled "How VMware Leverages Microsoft Volume Shadow Services for Virtual Machine Snapshots".

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Partner Exchange 2010…

Gabrie van Zanten about EMC's Avamar - EMC Avamar backup and recovery solutions utilize patented global data deduplication technology to identify redundant data at the source, minimizing backup data before it is sent over the LAN/WAN. With Avamar, you can achieve new levels of data reduction and…

ok, I’m either blind or this snuck under the radar.  I swear when I checked the download site this morning, this was not there.  However the release date says 2010/01/18.  This is apparently a patch fix for Update manager for those running the Cisco Nexus 1000v.  You can download the updated…

VMware's Partner Exchange kicks off today in Las Vegas. I'm not at the conference, but I'm getting updates via twitter from folks who are attending. Interesting updates are coming from Donn Bullock about the desktop virtualization element...(read more)<img><img>

New from Train Signal and VMware vExperts - Rick Scherer, Hal Rottenberg and David Davis is "vSphere Pro Vol. 1" - the latest VMware vSphere video training course. See a demo and find what's included in this newest vSphere training resource.

Last week I posted the link to the Beta release. Today Veeam announces the release of version 3.0.2 that now supports Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.

Release Notes

New Features

The following is a list of new features introduced in the Veeam FastSCP 3.0.2:

• Added support for Microsoft Windows 7 and…

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Just in case you missed it, XenServer is now open source.
It’s confirmed by the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby, who answered a question about this topic on virtualization.info.

Citrix XenServer is a commercial implementation of the Xen open source…

Exciting news for all you VMware vSphere admins and enthusiasts out there!  Train Signal, who produced the popular ‘VMware vSphere’ and ‘Hyper-V’ training videos have just released a new addition to the VMware vSphere suite of training products called ‘VMware vSphere Pro Series Vol. 1’.…

Today I was setting up the Nexus 1000V with Cisco UCS, and this was my 2nd time of experiencing the nexus 1000V. Previous experience when I did the 1st installation and configuration on Nexus 1000V, it take me few days to get it done, but it only took us 1 few hours to do so [...] Related posts:

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Crisis? What crisis? I hope VMware will widen the scope of its storage options for its disaster recovery automation product, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), this year. At the moment SRM only works with storage array-based replication from the big storage vendors. So far, purely software-based…

Some great news today – The new vSphere Pro Video Training is Available. There is new video learning course available from TrainSignal. It’s completely new Professional Video Training course which is focusing on some advanced management techniques via Power CLI for VMware vSphere 4 and also some…

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As soon as it received the green light to complete the Sun acquisition, Oracle moved on and acquired AmberPoint.

AmberPoint is a US company that offers application management and application performance measurement solutions.
It provides a real-time view into performance and runtime…

When you are troubleshooting an ESX host, you can see a lot off warnings in the VMKERNEL log: Jan 29 16:15:34 esx02.ict-freak.local vmkernel: 9:23:45:33.917 cpu1:4210)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “t10.9454450000000000000000001000000056900000D0000000″ –…

VMware may beef up storage options for its disaster recovery product, Site Recovery Manager, in 2010; and we may see further development to the VMware Data Recovery appliance. Also: will we see vSphere 4.5, and will VMware support Micrsoft Cluster Server and Veritas clustering?

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Those doing planning might well be interested in these stats from a real-world ThinPrint deployment in respect of how well it compresses jobs. We started by testing a job typical of the users; a PDF consisting of scanned black and white pages. He we measured the data passed on the network for each…

Today we noticed that one of our recent KBs: Virtual machine memory usage alarms triggered for virtual machines when guest operating system memory usage is low (1013206) has been getting a higher than average number of hits on it. From...

http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/cisco-announces-otv-the-private-cloud-just-got-more-fun/

I was going to get into another layer and Jason did. I lifted this from his site (above):

What OTV does is that it allows you to connect two L2 domains that are separated by a L3 network. Basically,…

Day 2 of PTAB was based mostly around Desktop virtualization.

Though ThinApp is an awesome product, I have always thought that the application virtualization piece could use some work, especially packaging and deployment. We discussed some cool new ways of dealing with ThinApp that cover…

vExpert Meeting Location, and Panoramics So Far VMware PEX officially starts today, but it’s been a full 2 and a half days of pre conference sessions, meetings, and get-togethers for me already. This post is a random mix of video, information, and links. Sorry for the mess! Video: PEX2010…

VMware has rolled out new names for their support tiers.  Gold Support now becomes Basic support and Platinum Support now becomes Production Support. · Basic Support is for test, development and non-production environments, where basic...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

So in my earlier post (WinXP vs. Win2k3 vs. Win2k8 IOPS Footprint) I finished the article with some questions. In this post I’m gonna focus on Windows 7 and try to answer the question: Do you have the same read/write ratio for Windows 7 compared to Windows XP Pro? I installed Windows 7…

Companies are spending millions of dollars right now to try and convince customers that hosted virtual desktops (HVDs) or virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) are the way to go.  Unfortunately, along with that messaging comes a great deal of confusion.  And once you get beyond the confusion (or…

We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives.  Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better.  At…

Today, while builing a ThinApp application, I get an error “GetFileAttributes for file <filename> failed?” I remember that this happens when the path where te Setup Capture files stored is too long. If you ever get this error, try to put your Setup Capture files in a short named folder on the…

I needed a quick one-liner today to help me find out how many HBA’s my hosts had, the following one-liner needs no more introduction: Get-VMHost | Select Name, @{N="FibreHBAs";E={($_ | Get-VMHostHba | Where { $_.Type -eq "FibreChannel"} | Measure-Object).Count}} | Out-GridView Output: And of…

At Partner Exchange 2010 in Las Vegas VMware unveiled the VMware Express, a huge truck which is chock full of all kind of VMware goodness. A rolling datacenter crossing the U.S. and Canada. Check out the full article on the VMware View Blog. Source:  http://blogs.vmware.com/view/2010/02/vmware-…

What is VMware Express? It’s a mobile datacenter. Inside of the truck there is a demo environment and briefing center. You can find inside whole mobile datacenter build around vSphere and view. This way VMware comes to their customers in  USA and Canada during the 2010 Virtualization Tour.…

At VMworld last year, F5 previewed and demonstrated their Long Distance vMotion solution. Since then, F5 has worked on integrating the solution into their BIG-IP product and leverage their new WAN Optimization Module (WOM). What does this mean for VMware...

Today is the first day of VMware Partner Exchange. According to a company news, VMware Partner Exchange 2010 Kicks Off With Record-breaking 2,600+ Attendees, 55 Sponsors and 45 Countries Represented Third Annual Event Grows More than 60 Percent Year over Year; VMware Continues to Invest in Solution…

The VMware Express was unveiled today at the 2010 Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV and I have to say that we here on the View team are very excited to see it hit the road. As you can probably tell from the picture above, the VMware Express is a big truck but it’s not your normal everyday rig. Oh…

Today VMware is proud to unveil the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV. This state of the art mobile datacenter, demo environment and briefing center has been built to bring...

Join us for the second APAC Virtualisation Roundtable. The cast is via TALKSHOE.com. The main topic of the night is “Xen Hypervizor & Xen Coud Platform (XCP)” with our special guest Kistoffer Sheather from Cloud Central. I also have few announcements to make. During the podcast we will define…

In the forward to this book I wrote: “Mike’s conversation writing style brings VMware vSphere 4 Implementation to life.  His skills gained as a VMware trainer show in his ability to break down complex theories and procedures into bite-size easily digestible portions.  Whether you are an…

For the PowerCLI lovers out there you may want to check out the recent Get-Scripting Podcast. This month Jonathan and I have interviewed the master of PowerCLI himself, Luc Dekens or LucD on the forums and LucD22 on twitter. Anyone who has ever visited the PowerCLI forums will know who Luc is, he…

TrainSignal has released (will release it officially tommorow) a new VMware video training product, the VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Volume I. This course is taught by three vExperts VCPs and it covers three distinct hot-topics in virtualization.

David Davis VMware View & ThinApp, VMware's…

  If like me you travel around a lot and are pretty busy finding the time to get a new laptop setup with all of the data and non-standard build software you require can be a time-consuming chore. More often than not you will be upgrading to a new more powerful machine with larger disks (unless you…

Just for fun I have collected the number of IOPS those 3 Microsoft OSes could generate at boot time over a period of 225 seconds. For each OS, I have installed the 32 bit edition, no additional components, roles or features added, just plain vanilla OS. I have allocated 512MB of memory to each…

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the vSphere Security Hardening Guide. Just a couple of days later William “the king of Perl” Lam already produced a script that checks the Hardening Guide best practices against your environment. It produces a great html based report. Source While going…

So there were a bunch of unconfirmed plans last year (2009!) that VMware might be getting rid of the Enterprise edition of vSphere in favor of the more expensive feature rich Enterprise Plus.  I think there was a lot of push back from customers and...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

I’ve got to tell you, I’m pretty darn excited right now.  Why?  I’m typing this to you from 30,000 feet on a Delta flight from Cincinnati to Las Vegas (for VMware Partner Exchange).  And why is that so special?  Because, as the title suggests, I’m typing this on my VDI image which…

I was taking a look at Cisco's OTV capability they are rolling out on the Nexus gear and my first impression was - wow!

The gist of it is: OTV is a new feature of the Nexus OS operating system that encapsulates Layer 2 Ethernet traffic within IP packets, allowing Ethernet traffic from a local area…

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In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history.

Two months after her…

“The desktop deployment productivity tools that NetApp and DynamicOps offer significantly increase the value of virtual infrastructures by improving performance, providing essential data management resources, and reducing costs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances,…

Every now and again VMware releases an update for their products, among those are also VMware Workstation. I have a small issue with the whole thing.

Firstly, I must say this is only regarding those who are running Workstation on Windows - from what I hear this does not happen on on a Linux Host…

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At the end of January Microsoft silently updated its Linux Integrated Components package to version 2.0, introducing the long awaited support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems in Hyper-V.

Microsoft announced future support for Red Hat operating systems in…

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Leostream announces today a new minor version for its Connection Broker that arrives over five months after the 6.2 release.

In this update the company introduces a number of new features:

• support for the open source version of Xen (the one released by Xen.org)
• support for Sun…

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix published a new architecture blueprint for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The 38-pages document provides guidance to design scalable virtual desktop infrastructures based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1 and…

The use cases for PowerCLI and automation continue to amaze me, a couple of nice use cases I have seen recently involve automating the deployment of VM’s for various reasons. The first reason, performance, what happens when a VM which is sat there for most of the year suddenly becomes busy and…

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Last month VMware lost Ganesh Mahabala, its Regional Director for India and SAARC region, CRN reports.

Mahabala has worked in VMware for almost three years and now has joined the system integrator Valuepoint Systems.

This is the third major change in the Indian executive team that…

In a comment on one of the previous dvSwitch posts, see dvSwitch scripting – Part 2 – dvPortgroup, Gert asked how he could check if a portgroup with a specific VLAN Id existed on a distributed virtual switch. Since a function that allows you to search for a portgroup that meets specific…

I am seeing quite a few comments appearing regarding Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualisation recently so I figured it was worth commenting on.

Or at least to the direction VMware wants us to go…. There has been a new page on VMware Website for migration from ESX 4 to ESXi 4. This clearly indicates the direction we all should go. To deploy ESXi 4 instead of ESX 4. Why and how it’s been discussed many times [...]

This is more of a note for future reference rather than a blog post.I recently had to replace a RAID-10 member disk as the original disk had developed bad sectors and was causing mostly read related problems in the array. (That’s a whole other story it it’s won right and I don’t have time to…

When I posted ESX vs. ESXi – Beyond the blogger opinion people commented that ESXi was the correct way to move forward and that I should get used to it and also prepare myself and my customers. This is the VMware recommendation. I took it very seriously, as I always do to anything related to my…

I WILL BE THERE!!! Yes, I have been invited by Gestalt IT to be a Delegate at the next Tech Field Day which is to be held in Boston this April. If you've not heard about these Tech Field Days, here is a little summary taken from the Gestalt IT Website: This unique event brings together innovative…

VMware’s Partner Technical Advisory Board (PTAB) is an invite-only group of the top VMware partners (<2% of North American partners represented, but almost 50% of North America VMware partner revenue) that convene around VMWorld and PartnerExchange to discuss current and future VMware…

VMware Converter Converting a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk (1016192) Date Published: 2/3/2010 VMware Data Recovery VMware Data Recovery backups fail with the error: failed, error -2241 (Catalog File invalid/damaged) (1015901) Date Published: 2/5/2010 VMware ESX CPU...

Here’s a tip that’s so simple and probably well known that it could be categorized as a stupid pet trick. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I leverage VMware DPM (an Enterprise licensing feature) in the lab so that during periods of lesser activity (while I’m at work or sleeping, or both), ESX…

I have just added three useful STPs to the Cisco Support Community: UCS STP003 Firmware Download UCS STP004 Firmware Core Activation UCS STP005: Firmware Component Activation New UCS code was released last week (1.1.1j) so I’m hoping that folks are going to test these STPs and help me improve…

For a lot of people it has been a crazy week. Some of you might wonder why, some of you know what I'm talking about. VMware Partner Exchange 2010. With PEX coming up for many of you that means GTJD,...

ntpro.nl - FlickriverOne of the first things I did after I signed-up for the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was downloading Visual Studio 2008. I’ve installed Visual Studio 2008 in a newly created Windows 2008 virtual machine and copied the vSphere Web Service SDK to the root of this VM.

Before…

Saturday was my travel day to VMware Partner Exchange 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. I left Atlanta at 1:30 pm EST and finally checked into my room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel around 4:30 pm PST. All it took was a couple of tweets and I was able to make plans with Theron Conrey for [...]

If you want to relocate your vCenter database from a local express SQL server to a central Microsoft SQL Server 2008, you can use the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard to copy and transform data between supported data sources and destinations.

The purpose of the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard…

While reading my personal emails today, I also checked the spam folder. One email title caught my eyes instantly, “Express Your Love with A Domain Name.” That sounds like an interesting idea for techies. Following the lead, I was thinking what VMware can offer to help you to express your love.…

There are three different VMware View 4 clients currently available for Windows clients. The first one is an ActiveX client which is installed if users login to the Connection Server via a web-browser. The second option is a standard 32-bit client. The third is a 32-bit client that supports the…

During last Friday VMware beer bash, I bumped into Carter Shanklin. He told me he’s ready show off how his Onyx project can help Java developers using VI Java API at Partner Exchange next week in Las Vegas. If you will be there, be sure to attend his session TEXIBP1007 – also known as…

Today a ran into an issue with the VMware Tools installer on Linux: The solution was simple this time. Just remove the locations file from from /etc/vmware-tools. You can do this by running the following command: rm –f /etc/vmware-tools/locations Now you are able to run the VMware Tool installer…

Some time ago I wrote an article called Free the Gladiators about the negative aspects of having uber-certified experts, which I called Gladiators: they have deep knowledge about one topic, and I think the more one knows about one topic then the more inertia you have. Later this month I’m…

I was reading this short post from Seth Godin and I realized that this is exactly one of the top reasons (if not the top one) why I left companies in the past. When I found myself just doing was I was told to do, it was time to leave. It meant that either the culture [...]

When I first became involved in virtualisation back in 2003 and 2004, people used to ask me if anyone actually used virtualisation in a product. Most of the time, their plans were to initially restrict its usage to test and development environments and disaster recovery (DR). Quite rightly, I guess,…

There are a number of hot keys that will help you move quickly around the vSphere client. A selection of these are listed below for ease of reference. Key Combination Function Ctrl + Shift F Search Ctrl + Shift H Hosts and Clusters Ctrl + Shift V VMs and Templates Ctrl +…

This morning I got an email from a colleague at the company I’m currently contracting at. There was a link to a video at Pbs.org where we can see Rocky Roccanova CEO at TouchTable, Inc, demoing the TouchTable which looks like a giant iPhone that marries satellite imagery with other data…

The winners are… So as promised here is the list of the lucky winners of Digiarty’s WinX DVD Ripper Platinum. It’s full blown software for Backing up your DVD’s. Even the latest DVD’s can be backed up and converted to different video format. “WinX DVD Ripper Platinum is the fastest DVD…

The rumours are confirmed and Diane Greene is involved in a new Stanford startup called Nicira.  According to the website and patent application, the gap they are filling is in network management: in their words, if the network is the computer, where’s the OS? Some links for you to check out:…

In my previous blogs, I talked about session management for scalability and best practices (#9). In this one, I am going to drill down to the bottom. To your surprises, there are two types of sessions involved in vSphere SDK: HTTP Session. It’s used to identify a client and tracked by the cookie…

I’ve been asked by a few customers about the location of the VMware ESX\ESXi LUN masking feature and how the LUN masking is done at the VMware ESX\ESXi level in version 4. In VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 the settings for LUN masking were available in the UI via the Advance Software settings under Disk ->…

Introduction Hopefully you have read my previous blog posts on pvSCSI.  It describes what the driver is, how it works, and how it can positively impact your performance and workloads.  Part two covers the process of installing the pvSCSI driver on an existing system and a new system.  Both can be…

One of the cmdlets that has been much improved in the recent version of PowerCLU 4 U1 is the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, This cmdlet runs a script or command inside the guest OS of each of the specified virtual machines. To run Invoke-VMScript, the user must have read access to the folder containing the…

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At the end of January VMware revealed that is working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today, and VMware suggested that this record depends on new …

If you’re at VMware Partner Exchange next week be sure to come see me at my session, TEXIBP1007 – also known as “Getting Stoned with ‘Project Onyx’” on Thursday at 11:30. If you haven’t seen it, Onyx is a tool...

Like the last several posts, this one hails from the storage section of the Enterprise Admin Blueprint. The Enterprise Admin exam is one of the several requirements to becoming a VCDX. As I go down this path, I hope to share with you some of my exam prep in the hope that it will help [...]

In case you missed it, VMware is running a Script-O-Mania contest to find the world’s very best ESXi management scripts. One point that might be worth clarifying, it doesn’t have to manage just ESXi, so if it works with ESX...

I am finishing up an installation of an EMC Clariion CX4 SAN. One of the final steps of the installation is to configure PowerPath/VE on the ESXi hosts. PowerPath/VE is EMC’s multipathing extension module for VMware (and Hyper-V), designed to replace the Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) for…

A great reference guide for creating and cloning virtual machines for use with VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XEN and how to avoid the most common pitfalls.

Today's video provides steps for manually uninstalling VMware Fusion. These steps entirely remove VMware Fusion from your Apple Macintosh computer. These steps are performed using VMware Fusion 3.0, but the same basic steps apply to earlier versions of VMware Fusion. If you intend to re-install…

An included part of every SAP system is the SGEN transaction that is used to recompile all the objects in the system after every system update. This job is run by SAP Basis administrators after a fresh install or upgrade...

VMware's former CEO is listed as an investor at a Bay area network virtualization startup; and other news in brief.

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I’ve finally got round to reading Shannon McFarland’s fantastic Cisco Validated Design on VMware View 4.0. Shannon has done a lot of lab work and works closely with VMware to ensure our products and services are integrated for those customers who are going down the VDI route. His awesome doc…

ESX vs. ESXi is a big decision. The ESXi hypervisor is catching on with vSphere users and those new to virtualization, but ESX is still the VMware hypervisor of choice for many.

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Seems this is becoming part of a series. Like the last few posts, this one was also produced from objective 1.1 of the VCDX Blueprint, and is part of my exam prep. Task: Manage VMFS file systems using command line tools. Solution: [root@ProfessionalVMware root]# vmkfstools No valid command…

Cisco had their quarterly quarter earnings call a few days ago [transcript care of Seeking Alpha]. These things are really interesting and I am starting to follow them. The senior people give some good summary of they latest goings on in their company and the analysts usually ask some good…

This post is a big deal for me personally. It is the first public acknowledgment of a major change in my life. This blog post will be about me announcing this change; but it will also be about why I am doing it and what lessons I feel can be [...]

This post is the first of a series about VMware vMA 4.0. Today, here is a little trick for lazy admins (like me ) to reconfigure eth0 of your vMA appliance without going through some time-consuming manipulations . So logon preferably at the console with the vi-admin account and run the…

I received a bunch of questions around storage masking over the last couple of weeks. One of them was around VMware’s best practice to mask LUNs on a per cluster basis. The best practice has been around for years and basically is there to reduce conflicts. More hosts accessing the same LUNs means…

The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by…

Find out more in logs concerning PSOD. Way back I explained in my post that exists several ways to collect logs from vCenter Server and send those crucial informations to vmware support to check out. This time I saw a VMware KB article explaining how to collect logs from a ESXi server doing PSOD…

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At the beginning of January Microsoft launched its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing offering: Windows Azure.
Despite the company’s Chief Architect Ray Ozzie said that Azure will be able to compete with Amazon EC2 and similar Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds,…

The Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch delivers VN-Link services to virtual machines hosted on its server. It takes advantage of the VMware vSphere framework to offer tight integration between server and network environments, and to help ensure consistent, policy-based network capabilities to all servers in…

I have been reading through all of the VCE vBlock reference documents that were recently published as announced by Chad. The last thing we want is for our implementation to be forked, away from the blessed best practices. [jump to the end for brief comments on the guides, this post is about…

In this quick tip, I’m going to show how you can use VMware PowerCLI scripts as part of your VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) recovery plan. This quick tip is taken from my soon-to-be-released book on VMware SRM 4.0. Read on…

If you’re a VMware Partner, you should check if your company has completed all of the requirements necessary to remain at the Professional level in the VMware Partner Network.

Solution Provider Recently VMware introduced new benefits to best support your organization with a go-to market business…

You may have read blogs from my colleagues Mike DiPetrillo, Duncan Epping about the VMware Script-O-Mania contest. The prizes are $2,500 (1st), $1,000 (2nd), and $500(3rd) respectively. The contest ends in March 15, 2010. So act quickly! “Wait, how can I WIN the prizes?” Well, first of all, you…

Like the last post, this one also hails from objective 1.1 of the VCDX Blueprint, and is part of my exam prep. Task: Configure an NFS Datastore using command line tools. Solution: [root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-nas esxcfg-nas <options> [<label>]…

At VMworld 2009 attendees were able to purchase the first book ever published by NetApp in the VMworld bookstore. This book was NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices. Since then the book has been a huge success. I was...

Continuing with catching up from the topics that I didn't get to post over the past week and a half... Last week Storage Monkeys announced the results of their Top Storage Vendor Blog poll. NetApp was well represented with three...

This one is taken from the first objective in the VMware Enterprise Admin Exam Blueprint. Specifically from the skills section: - Perform advanced multi-pathing configuration – Configure multi-pathing policy — Configure round-robin behavior using command-line tools After logging into the…

Recently my colleague Jon Klaus was installing VMware VIEW4 with a customer as he ran into a problem. In his setup there where two ESX hosts that each held 10 VDI VM’s and when putting one host into...

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To be able to update from a post Opensolaris 2008.11 release to the latest development build use the following steps: # pkg set-authority -O http://dev.opensolaris.org/dev development # pkg refresh # pkg image-update -v I have finally found the correct website for the most up to date instructions:…

Storage VMotion isn't supported by Lab Manager, but there is another tool that can help you migrate data between datastores: SSMove.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

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While this actually requires no special settings, I figure it’s worth noting, if for nothing more than to state that in VMware Fusion 3, ESX 3.5 requires no additional settings to be operational. Basically it works as follows: Download the ESX ISO (vmware.com/download/vi) In VMware Fusion create…

Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look. If you look at the way we do our jobs today, it seems to be a lot like factory, blue [...]<img>

It’s very interesting to see that now that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players like Amazon Web Services are clawing their way “up the stack” and adding more platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities, that Microsoft is going “down stack” and providing IaaS capabilities by way of…

Scott Sauer recently asked me a tough question on Twitter.  My roaming best practices talk includes the phrase “do not use PVSCSI for low-IO workloads”.  When Scott saw a VMware KB echoing my recommendation, he asked the obvious question: “Why?”  It took me a couple of days to get a…

Introduction to vStorage APIs for Data Protection vStorage APIs for Data Protection were introduced in vSphere 4.0 to facilitate seamless virtual machine backup and recovery. Protecting virtual machines in the VMware environment with traditional data protection methodology had its challenges....

I had been busy with the demo on Cisco UCS with VMware and EMC recently. 1 of the key features I had tested was about the Stateless Computing claim by Cisco. As a server or system guys, we all know that the ability to maintain the system state with UUID, Firmware, BIOS, LAN & SAN [...] Related…

Using VMware PowerCLI scripts with VMware Site Recovery Manager can help you create a more robust, customized recovery plan. We show you how.

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Calling all coding hacks! Back in December, VMware launched the VMware Script-O-Mania contest. The goal of the Script-O-Mania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. But this isn’t just fun and games – there’s…

Using IP-based storage with Cisco UCS isn't terribly complicated, but it might be a bit more complicated than at first glance. This post has some additional information.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage,…

Sometimes our knowledgebase gets a little out of date. Sometimes we inadvertently publish incorrect information. It happens. Because we're human, the odds are that eventually we'll make a mistake. If you ever find something in our knowledgebase that seems incorrect...

The VMware Virtualization Forum event is a free, interactive full day event where you will learn about virtual infrastructure from experts, industry analysts and companies like yours. No matter what your company size, there's a virtualization solution for you—from the desktop to the datacenter.…

So you want to learn PowerCLI, if your not a book kinda person and haven’t purchased Hal Rottenberg’s great book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell then there is great news for you. Trainsignal have let it slip that coming soon to a website near you will be…. Managing…

Paul Davey

Xtravirt is about to release another great tool; the vSphere Client RDP Plug-in. Last week Paul Davey has invited me to join the Xtravirt RDP Plug-in beta program. I was feeling very honored with his invitation and started performing some tests on their new RDP extension right away. I…

Paragon Software representatives contacted me to let me know that the company is giving away 5,000 copies of its latest partitioning software... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

I was going to just tweet this news, but I thought it is too exciting for 140 characters to handle! I'm a big believer in everything visual as you know, and I think that this kind of video based training is the way to go for anyone learning about something new for the first time. The [...]

VMware…

This weeks chinwag is with Chris Dearden. It’s a first chinwag I’ve done – so many thanks to Chris for being my hapless guinea pig. I learnt quite a bit in the recent weeks preparing for this – which I think is subject in its own right. There are SO many competing formats, software and [...]

A number of things can be said about virtual appliances (VAs). For a start, they can be a powerful vector to quickly deploy applications without the burden of setting up a possibly complex environment, giving a kick-start to a project or testing new products in a timely fashion.
Virtual…

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In September 2009 VMware announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to offer its Virtual Profiles product as part of View.
Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a…

I recently set out to enable VMware ESX(i) 4 Round Robin load balancing with EMC Celerra (CLARiiON) fibre channel storage.  Before I get to the details of how I did it, let me preface this discussion with a bit about how I interpret Celerra storage architecture.  The Celerra is built on CLARiiON…

I want to tell you a story about how my evening went the other night. I hope you don't mind a narrative. Monday I received an email from a friend in the VMware community, "Did you see the Register, it's...

Following up on the interest from our last post, Cody Bunch and I will be running the first of what should become a series of VCDX Enterprise Admin Brown Bag sessions. The topic this week will be the CLI. So all the good things like the ESXCFG c0mmands and useful Linux commands etc will be…

Some best practices using VMware Converter. New video from VMware KB website. This time it’s about using VMware converter. To master VMware converter permits you sometimes to save your day too ….. This video provides an overview of the best practices for converting a machine with VMware…

It’s not quite VMworld, but if you work for a VMware partner in North America chances are good your are going to Las Vegas next week for VMware Partner Exchange 2010 (PEX2010) at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. I’m sure there are more than a few that are traveling from overseas to attend as…

Tonight I was sitting with my Mac Book Pro, wife and kids all in bed, perfect blogging time. Except no idea what I wanted to write. After a burst of twitter encouragement from @rickvanover here we go: Five things you should know about VMware Certs: 1. If you work for a VMware partner, start with the…

This procedure shows how to use ThinApp to package non-executable files such as a document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

In the current issue of Fortune Magazine, they unveil the '100 Best Companies to Work For' and for 2010 NetApp ranks #7. While I understand this may not be breaking news for some, I would like to share a few...

In yesterday’s blog, I talked about a little known secret of vSphere MOB – the invisible embedded XML in the HTML pages. To take advantage of the secret, I created a client side REST API which was shipped in VI Java API 2.0. Note that I call it a Client side REST, because it is different [...]…

You may have noticed that outside of last week's Cisco NetApp VMware alliance launch I haven’t been writing with much frequency. The reason for the recent lack of posts were due to a misbehaving gallbladder and subsequent Cholecystectomy. I didn’t...

We recently published the VMware vShield Zones Reviewer's Guide. The purpose of this document is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of VMware™ vShield Zones. This document is intended to provide IT professionals with the necessary information to learn the...

2010 is going to be an exciting year and we're already off to a great start with a lot of activity happening around VMware View. Here's an update on some of the upcoming activities that should be of interest: VMware View Launch Tour Yesterday, February 2nd, was the first day of the 64 city VMware…

In parts one and two we concentrated on the Server side of the deployment, now it is time to configure the client. Now I have installed a default installation of Windows Vista under Workstation and joined it to the PVM.internal domain. All that we need to do here is install the client and test the…

This is just a reminder. The ESXi scripting contest is still running.  Make sure you enter the competition. So far not many people have so chances of winning are pretty big! VMware challenges you to build the best, most creative ESXi management scripts possible. The goal of the ScriptoMania contest…

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21032 Nationwide’s data centre transformation programme is designed to improve IT architecture while cutting operational and energy cots. The firm says that by removing old hardware, improving service continuity, simplifying disaster…

As I promised in a previous post I wanted to migrate from a vCenter to whole new machine

Process was:

• Export folders
• Export VM locations in Folders
• Export Permissions
• Export Custom Attributes
• Create Folders on the new vCenter
• Disable DRS/HA
• Remove ESX hosts from Source vCenter and add to…

In the new rPath rBuilder flash UI the “resign from appliance” button is disabled so you need to either switch to the old UI or go directly to the old project membership page http://www.rpath.org/project/-short-project-name-/members for example http://www.rpath.org/project/asteriskplus/members

Although competition is never good for any random drawing, Aaron Silber sent over this open invite to help shape future Citrix XenApp curriculum. Citrix Education would like to invite XenApp users and subject matter experts to...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

Today's new video provides an overview of how to change the IP address, hostname, and gateway of the Service Console in VMware ESX, a pretty common scenario we encounter. The video uses VMware ESX 4.0 for the demonstration, but the steps apply to earlier versions as well. For more information and…

I was doing research for an RFP yesterday about carbon footprints as they related to PUE, Data Center Operations, and IT resources in general. What I realized was that IT still looks at itself in silos, not systems. Let me explain...

This morning I got my copy of eWeek and on the cover was a pointer…

Following up on the interest from our last post, Tom Howarth and I will be running the first of what should become a series of VCDX Enterprise Admin Brown Bag sessions. The topic this week will be the CLI. We’re going to give this a shot with DimDim, and can accept a total of 25 folks. [...]

In 2009, Gartner predicted that 60% of VMs would be less secure than their physical counterparts. Keep these resources on hand and avoid being part of a similar statistic.

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rPath rBuilder documents have a new home at http://docs.rpath.com/ and there is still a wiki at http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Main_Page

Right you north of England based Virtualisation fanciers listen up, the date of the next Northern VMUG has been set for Tuesday the 13th April  at the Round Foundry in Leeds. Now this is a short walk from the Leeds train station,and also has good local parking. further to this there are a number of…

The VMware Infrastructure 3 Support Life Cycle Policy, and especially the End of Support Matrix that you can see a summary table below (full table available at VMware.com) covers the software suites VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter, Standard and Enterprise Editions and includes the following…

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As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Cisco is leading a new trend in computing architectures by pushing for datacenter-in-a-box solutions, where the entire computing stack is designed and integrated to work as a whole.

It is the Apple philosophy applied to the data center. Or a…

Right you north of England based Virtualisation fanciers listen up, the date of the next Northern VMUG has been set for Tuesday the 13th April  at the Round Foundry in Leeds. Now this is a short walk from the Leeds train station,and also has good local parking. further to this there are a number of…

So what are the differences between win2k8, win2k8 SP2, and win2k8 R2? These naming conventions and differences between versions are a constant cause for confusion. So here's the short take:

UPDATE: Download the full chat conversation during the podcast. Click here. Finally the APAC Virtualisation Roundtable podcast is off the ground. I would like to thank everybody for the massive participation, and to be honest I was afraid that I would be the only one online. However, I believe it…

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Yesterday Quest announced its Q4 2009 financial results, disclosing some details about its virtualization business performance and future plans.

The most important one is that its subsidiary Vizioncore had more than 19,000 customers at the end of 2009.

Another interesting point is…

We just finished the first APAC Virtualisation Roundtable podcast which got off the ground due to Andre Leibovici.

After months of waiting, the European Commission has finally concluded its antitrust investigation of the Oracle/Sun acquisition, coming down on the side of Oracle and opening the door to the conclusion of its $7.4 billion deal. With that decision, Oracle was finally able to disclose its…

With the introduction of vSphere, VM configurations with 8 CPUs and 255 GB of memory are possible. While I haven’t seen that much VM’s with more than 32GB, I receive a lot of questions about 8-way virtual machines. With today’s CPU architecture, VMs with more than 4 vCPUs can experience a…

Not a lot of info is found when you Google for manually selecting/fixing the primary HA nodes in a VMware VI or vSphere environment. Of course Duncan Epping has a couple of extremely interesting posts on Yellow-Bricks.com concerning HA even when it comes down to selecting or promoting the HA status…

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If you are lucky enough to get a Cisco UCS system for your lab you might get a bit confused if your run it up and don't connect it to any upstream switches. That is you try to just use the blades to talk to each other.

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The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how…

This is a follow up on a post I did a couple of weeks ago to create a mapping table between Windows- and VMware hard disks. In another previous post PowerCLI: Get WMI info from isolated guests, I showed you how to get WMI info from a guest without using the guest’s network. I used this [...]

It’s been a while since I updated so I thought I’d mention a few videos I made a while back that give some useful tips in using PowerCLI 4.0 U1. Video 1: Using multiple sessions with PowerCLI 4.0 U1. This...

I agree that breaking the storage encapsulation in Virtual Machines is generally a bad thing. What do I mean? That the entirety of the Virtual Machine is not contained in VMDKs stored on some datastore. Examples of this are RDMs,...

VDI utilizes a very different technology than SBC, but both host desktops on a central server farm controlled by the IT staff. Users become wary as they see the “personal” part of their PCs diminish. They tend to not like change – even when it’s positive, and organizations that implement a…

Free tool from Xtravirt – RDP connection Plug-in. Xtravirt is know from the past providing great PDF tutorials for configuring VMware workstation to be able to run  ESX Server as a nested VM. (Fyi This step is no longer necessary in VMware Workstaion 7). Or providing little script to download all…

Last March, we learned that Symantec’s Workspace Profiles product was an OEM / rebranded edition of RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles . Then in September, we learned that VMware also signed an agreement with RTO Software for their Virtual Profiles...(read more)<img><img>

Despite Cisco’s recent entry into the “compute” data center sector, John Chambers said during the 10/24/2009 quarter earnings call that the UCS is experiencing, “…solid market reception with a very good initial ramp and order pipeline.” As the first optimized hosting platform for a…

Most VI SDK developers know Managed Object Browser (MOB), and mostly have used it for better understanding of the SDK, or assisting programming and debugging. In my opinion, it’s a must-have  tool for every vSphere SDK developer. It’s extremely helpful if you want to figure out the inventory…

The event will take place on Friday, February 12, 2010. It is a live event being simulcast to multiple locations. It will also be recorded and made available online a few days after the event. You do have to register to attend and to download the event.

All the details and registration are outlined…

February 10, 2010 Please join VMware® on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 from 5:00 P.M. – 6:30 P.M. for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at Sullivan’s Steakhouse. Don’t miss the opportunity to network with your peers, relax, and have some fun. RSVP today!…

Hi folks! Been a while, but I have a couple nifty tidbits here for you all: A lot of folks have been having trouble with getting VMware View’s PCoIP to work in higher resolutions. This is caused by your Virtual Machine not having enough VRAM to power higher resolutions (since unlike RDP, PCoIP is…

It's the odd system that can't support VMware tools, so this solution should only be a last resort.

Alright folks, here is another class from VMware Education. vSphere Manage for Performance. The much anticipated, and needed class that will teach attendees how to manage, and monitor performance in the vSphere environments. This class is categorized as an advanced class as there is a certain level…

In continuation to both Jason Boche's and Scott Lowe's excellent posts about the recommended Advanced Settings for ESX while using a Celerra NFS mount, and after Jase McCarty's post earlier regarding how to set the recommended settings for ESX and NetApp, I wanted to share with you my script for…

Yes I know, don’t ignore alarms ;-) , when your VMFS fills up, one or more virtual machines will be labelled Pending and don’t run any further. You’ll also receive the following error.

msg.hbacommon.outofspace:There is no more space for virtual disk WXP-01.vmdk. You may be able to continue this…

Win up to $2500 in the VMware ESXi Scripting Contest!

The recent Zimbra acquisition by VMware threw me a bit for a loop initially.  Then I started chewing on it and read the good post by Rodney Haywood.   Very shortly afterwords I had a classic Homer Duh moment. VMware aims to build from the ground up the best cloud computing solution for sale as…

[UPDATED with Winner at the end of this article] Last month, Gabe and I announced that we’re planning on doing a five-day, five-product VDI shoot-out. There were a lot of great ideas in the conversation around the idea , and we’re working...(read more)<img><img>

For all of you who have been waiting for a version that works on Windows 7 and on Windows Server 2008 R2 it is out. For those that do not know the current tool does not work correctly on Windows 7 or on Windows 2008 R2

As was posted on the Veeam Forums you download a Beta release here

There are…

This week in VMware news: VMware outperforms Wall Street's earnings expectations and joins forces with NetApp Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. in a joint effort to deliver end-to-end server stacks.

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The capability to overcommit memory is an evident advantage that VMware has over competition. 
Marketing departments, partners, and even customers engage endless debates about its value and usefulness in every scenario. 

Microsoft has been particularly vocal in downplaying the…

I have rebuilt several systems lately, all of which are connected to a NetApp filer. Reference Material: Because I’m connecting to a NetApp filer, I made sure to reference TR-3749 NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices for the appropriate settings.  I am specifically referencing the…

At a customer site we received several notifications of performance issues with a VMware VI3 environment. After having checked the configuration of the VMs and the Hosts we decided to dive into esxtop. At first sight we did not see any abnormalities. Low %RDY, which is usually the first thing I…

VMware SRM is gaining a lot of traction and many companies are quickly making it the defacto choice for DR in their environments, but is SRM the right choice?  For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to get familiar with SRM (Site Recovery manager), it is a Disaster Recovery automation…

There is now a choice of three different editions of rPath rBuilder: rBuilder online edition (max 20 images) rBuilder download free edition (max 20 images) rBuilder download paid edition (unlimited images) rPath have written a page summarising the differences between each !

TechTarget announced that it has completed an acquisition of Mike Laverick's UK-based virtualization Website, RTFM-ed . This is the second... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Last Friday I had the opportunity to present a Virtualization101 seminar at the Oracle and MySQL Sydney User Group, Australia. Firstly I have to thank Pythian for the invite and say that it was a pleasure to talk to such amazing group of people. However, when I was invited I thought it would be a…

This post was born from an email that I sent the other day to the VMware team at my work. I was asking for their opinion on ESX vs. ESXi for a small-medium sized VMware View 4 design with about 700 virtual desktops. I thought it would be an easy one but the email thread [...]

In the first post in this series we installed and configured the management server and a dummy AD and DNS environment, there was an aside on Certificate services too, this time we will start to configure the Client/ Server communications.  so without further ado lets get started. Now the way to do…

RV tools – famous freeware application had been updated. As spotted on Duncan’s blog there has been new update of RVTools, which is one of my favourite Freeware Applications that I use to manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure. This little tool works with VI SDK. It’s a windows .NET 2.0…

For a number of years VMware has been using an internal tool to help customers diagnose problems with virtual machines. The tool, named vmss2core, became publically available with the release of VMware Workstation 7.0.

The biggest difference between vmss2core and other debugging solutions is that it…

The Microsoft licensing required for VDI is called VECD (Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop – formerly Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop) and it replaces the need for either Windows 7 or Terminal Server (RDS). It is licensed only by device and costs (list) $23 per PC or laptop per year if…

After talking about BriForum 2010 for months and jockeying some dates around, we're pleased to let everyone know that we've finalized all the details for BriForum 2010 , which will take place from June 15-17, 2010 at the Chicago Hilton. 2010:...(read more)<img><img>

With Hyper-V R2 out the door, leaked screenshots from a post-RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2 suggest a Dynamic Memory feature is coming in a successor.

I started doing Lotus Domino server administration back in 1994 on version 3.0, about 5 years ago the company I work for decided to outsource it to a hosting provider. While it was outsourced I was still pretty involved with the management and administration of the environment. We recently decided…

Since joining VMware two and half years ago, I have been working like a consultant on partner enablement projects in various technical areas like SDK, SRM array adapter, VI Client plug-in, DRS clustering, etc. While working on these engagements, I always think about more efficient and more…

Through out the virtualization era that we are in the heart of as I write this, the supporting technology has grown at an amazing pace. When hypervisors first started to get a foothold in the data center not much was expected to change. It was a great way to consolidate systems that were wasting…

I’m looking for some feedback and thoughts from the community to help define a reasonable Licensing Model that takes Physical & Virtual into account.  From my view as a client I don’t think this is all that complicated at the end of the day. More discussions with some vendors around licensing…

VCE work continues along furiously…. We have just published more detailed documents outlining how to: Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole (Deployment Guide) Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider...

Today a question was asked of me, someone asked how to find out who had deleted a ResourcePool, now im not one to get anyone into trouble but I also cant resist a scripting challenge so here was the process I used to write the following one-liner: Get-VIEvent | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq…

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Tracking the virtualization industry for more than six years (virtualization.info was launched in September 2003) has been a challenging, time-consuming and sometimes tiring task. But there always are fun moments.

The best ones come from the never ending skirmish between VMware and…

Migrating from ESX to ESXi can be a hassle, but forward-looking users say there are clear management benefits from using the slimmed-down hypervisor.

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VMware New Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture Enhances Security When Sharing Data Center Resources Across Virtualized and Enterprise Cloud Environments SILICON VALLEY, Calif.—Jan. 26, 2010—As enterprises move toward a data center that is 100 percent virtualized, Cisco, NetApp (NASDAQ:…

Well, it’s properly official now http://www.techtarget.com/html/pr/pr-02012010.htm I’ve been negotiating since late last year – and creating content since 4th Jan… So good so far. The change over has already had a big impact on the quality of life, and given me new impetus to create new…

This Q&A was supposed to be part of our This Week in Virtualization podcast on Oracle’s Sun acquisition and future virtualization plans, but we ran into some technical difficulties and weren’t able to include it. Our guest was Jack Kaiser, vice president of strategic technologies for…

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Last week a report from The 451 Group ignited speculations about which company VMware may acquire next.
The list includes Terracotta, GenStone Systmes, MuleSoft, SOPERA, Heroku, Engine Yard, Skyway Software, Chordian Software.
The analysis firm even suggests that VMware may try…

I was wondering that this week as I started to see more expo/trade show emails starting to show up. The noise around cloud seems to be gaining, not subsiding, and it has me wondering why.

It also got me thinking that CLOUD was not a form of computing, but an Acronym.

Completely
Ludicrous
Offerings of
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Many people think the key to the virtual data centre is about getting as many virtual machines (VMs) on a physical server as possible. It is still the case, however, that prohibitive memory costs are a roadblock to high consolidation ratios, and virtualisation availability tools still lag behind…

Here is our Top 20 KB list for January. This list is ranked by the number of times a Tech Support ticket was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article. Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0...

After nearly nine months since the announcement of VMware vSphere 4.0, VMware is finally making available a public draft copy of a security hardening guide that can be used to help securely deploy vSphere in a production environment -- with a focus on configuration of the virtualization…

I’ve update the esxtop precis to version 1.1. This is just a small update, with a couple of corrections and incorporating the updates that Duncan has recently added recently.  As ever, this is really Mr Epping’s great work that I’ve just re-presented  in a handy little card. Feel free to…

I am getting to play with App-V a little bit more so I decided that it was a good idea to build a test lab, well resources are short I currently have no 64 bit hardware capable of running vSphere in my lab, so I have had to resort to my faithful Workstation 7 instance [...]

At virtualization.info there’s a special skepticism about virtual appliances in their current form.
No less than three years ago we wrote about the shortcomings and hidden risks of this virtual machine incarnation. 
A modular data center may certainly be in the future of IT,  but in its…

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At the end of last week VMware updated its Lifecycle Manager product, reaching version 1.1 (build 227208).
The product has been in beta for over six months, but it doesn’t introduce any major new feature.

It’s primarily for performance enhancements, and comes with…

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Last week the startup Liquidware Labs updated its flagship product Stratosphere to version 4.5.3.

This minor update (version 4.5 came out in October 2009) just introduces a much welcome one-click assessment that produces a useful PowerPoint slidedeck.

To be honest the slides…

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As most readers know, Microsoft offers three Hyper-V editions: the one coming with the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, the one included in a stripped down version of Windows called “Server Core”, and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server.

The Server Core edition of Windows lacks…

Taken from Rodney Haywood's Blog Andre Leibovici is trying to start up a APAC Virtualization Roundtable run via Talkshoe like the VMTN Communities Roundtable. The first one is on this Wednesday (3rd Feb 2101) night at 9:00pm Sydney time. This is 10:00am London time. If you are in APAC, or anyw…

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Do your applications have a pCard yet? Given the hopes of some industry people one day they may.

Last friday VMware released Virtual Center 2.5 update 6.  Most interesting new feature is that it now supports customization for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. From the Release notes: What’s New Guest Operating Systems Customization Improvements Customization support for the following…

EMC-VMware SolutionTracks are a series of concise, easy-to-follow whiteboard tutorials that illustrate how EMC can enhance, extend, and accelerate the value of VMware to create a flexible, powerful, information infrastructure that meets your needs today and will grow with you in the future. EMC-…

Do I choose the PVSCSI or LSI Logic virtual adapter on ESX 4.0 for non-IO intensive workloads? I thought that the question about using or not VMware Paravirtual adapter was solved with the vSphere 4 Update 1 and the announce that VMware has officialy support PVSCSI on boot disks. For me it was clear…

February is "sweeps" month in the US, so we thought we should participate on BrianMadden.com with some great videos! Specifically, I'll be doing hour-long, one-on-one videos interviews with VMware's desktop CTO Scott Davis and Citrix's...(read more)<img><img>

Andre Leibovici is trying to start up a APAC Virtualization Roundtable run via Talkshoe like the VMTN Communities Roundtable.

The first one is on this Wednesday night at 9:00pm Sydney time.

If you are in APAC, or anywhere else you may want to join in.

http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/75046

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I'll keep it short this time as I seriously need to get some sleep. Scott Sauer - VMware Data Recovery (vDR) Overview The underlying backup technology behind vDR is the new vStorage API (Not VCB), it takes advantage of a...

Title: EPISODE 1 – Introduction & Your Virtual Environment Start Time: Wed 03/02/10 06:00 PM (KUALA LUMPUR TIME) Duration (minutes): 60 Call ID: 75046 Click the link below http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/75046 Other Time zones: Sydney(Australia) – 9PM Perth (Australia) – 6PM Hong Kong (Hong Kong)…

I posted two blogs on the top 10 best practices of using the vSphere SDK (part 1, part 2) two days ago. Here is a list of several common mistakes developers make during their development. It’s based on the stats from our SDK support team. Defining wrong interval information in PerfQuerySpec…

For future reference, VMware releases always seem to come in bunches.  Update 6 for vCenter 2.5 has been released and can be downloaded here. The update mostly includes guest operating system custimization enhancements. Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes: Guest Operating…

The Bluetooth DUN package has been well received, but was hardly a profound programming endeavour. So, I’ve been trying to find suitable inspiration for a more substantial project. This morning, someone made a comment on the Bluetooth DUN page that there’s no way to tell if the phone has a…

VMware Consolidated Backup File level backups of a virtual machine fail, but full level backups work (1014358) Date Published: 1/26/2010 VMware ESX Root users cannot login after upgrading from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 (1014530) Date Published: 1/28/2010 Virtual machine...

Running VMware on NFS on an EMC Celerra storage array? Here are some performance optimizations you might want to consider.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

EMC Celerra…

I recently migrated a production environment off of Fibre Channel over to NFS. For anyone looking to implement either NFS or iSCSI in a vSphere or VI3 environment, I would definitely recommend reading the post A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware hosted on Chad…

vLogView, helps you view and search all LOG files from each of your ESX hosts from a single application. For more info and the latest download, visit http://xtravirt.com/xd10132

This post was going to be part of my post on how to build a App-V demo lab in Workstation, However as it is a bit long . I decided to split it into its own separate post. Now in my demo environment I needed to utilise secure channels for App-V traffic over my environment. The [...]

Week 4 already. Just one week before VMware Partner Exchange kicks off in Las Vegas. I'll be around, but not for PEX we're doing VCDX panels. I guess this week was all about the NetApp/Cisco/VMware announcement. And for those who...

As I have mentioned, I am a consultant. I walk into a business and I eventually walk away. The first thing I ask for to get acclimated with the environment when I show up on a new gig is documentation. This never goes well. Every business I go to, there is always one of the [...]

Last week I attended a Magirus course on administrating you VMware environment using PowerCLI, and below is some of the small scripts I created. These code sniplets will help you manage your VMware environment and give you some ideas of how powerful the VMware PowerCLI really is. I’m sure VMware…

I am attempting to pull together a blog post around performance, it’s going to be a four part segment on each I/O component of VMware, CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking.  My goal is to try and cover the various tools that you can use to help troubleshoot performance problems that you might…

Okay, so I'm probably the last person who wrote his VCP-410 exam on the planet, but at least I've done it with an awesome score! 481 out of 500! I've been rescheduling this exam since November 2009 due to many factors, but mainly because of the lack of time! Today I had to sit the exam [...]

Passed…

Most of my colleagues have a home lab with at least some equipment that is rackable, but because of expense, room size, or the decor concerns of a much smarter significant other purchasing a data center rack is not possible (or advisable). In fact, our servers, storage and switches are stacked under…

Allan Leinwand from GigaOm wrote a great article asking “Where are the network virtual appliances?” This was followed up by another excellent post by Rich Miller. Allan sets up the discussion describing how we’ve typically plumbed disparate physical appliances into our network infrastructure…

Update: Some readers are reporting issues with the links on this page.  At 10:54 EST this Sunday morning it appears that the technical section of VMware’s web site is offline.  I’ll check it back in a couple hours to see if they have come back and update the article accordingly. Update: It…

Rob de Veij just released a brand new version of RVTools. Download it while it is still hot! Please note that this application supports ESX(i) Server 3.5 and vCenter 2.5. vSphere 4 is in experimental support. Latest Version: 2.8 | January 31, 2010 Download | Documentation On vHost tab field “#…

Want to manage a Hyper-V server remotely? Perhaps you want to manage your Hyper-V servers from your desktop PC... To do this, you need to install Microsoft's Hyper-V remote MMC. You can find all the instructions to download this MMC and get it installed at: TechNet - Install and Configure Hyper-V…

Workstation 7.0.1 sneaked out behind me on Friday and can be download here. Looks like bug fixes and some new supported guest and host OSes. Here’s the What’s New section from the Release Notes: Workstation 7.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues. This release of VMware…

New Release of VMware Workstation 7.0.1 is out. VMware just released a minor update for VMware Workstation 7.  This release, 7.0.1 brings up some more compatible OS for hosts and guests. We can see that W2008R2 is now fully compatible with both host and quest OS, and also Vista SP2. Also Ubuntu…

Join me for the first experimental APAC Virtualization Roundtable.  The cast will be via TALKSHOE.com. Amongst other things we will discuss the best time for our weekly live podcast and the theme of the night will be “Your Virtual Environment”. You can participate via web accessing…

Part 1 – The setup

This week I’ve received a test model of the Cisco Catalyst 2960G-8TC-L from the nice people over at  Azlan, the Enterprise Division of Tech Data Corporation. The switch has 8 Ethernet 10/100/1000 ports, one of which is for dual-purpose, besides that it’s very compact in size…

Workstation 7.0.1 - Release Notes

What's New

Workstation 7.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues. This release of VMware Workstation adds the following new support:

New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems

This release provides support for the following host and…

Yesterday VMware released a new version of VMware Workstation. The new maintenance release fixes some known issues and does support new operating systems. For a full description please check the VMware Workstation 7.0.1 release notes.

Got an invitation email from my colleague Jame Watters who is the organizer of the SF Cloud Computing Club. This is the 4th of a very successful series of meet-ups for cloud professionals to network and brain storm new ideas. I just registered the event, no nice portrait yet. If you are in bay…

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!” It’s obvious now that Cloud Computing is no longer just a concept. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, vCloud Express was announced late last year, Microsoft is moving…

HP LeftHand VSA when installing on Windows Server 2008 "The $PRODUCT_NAME$ is not supported on this platform."

Craig Balding, Rich Mogull and I are working on a book due out later this year. It’s the latest in the McGraw-Hill “Hacking Exposed” series.  We’re focusing on virtualization and cloud computing security. We have a very interesting set of topics to discuss but we’d like to crowd/cloud-…

MashSSL allows web applications to mutually authenticate and establish a secure channel without having to trust the user or the browser. MashSSL is a Layer 7 security protocol running within HTTP in a RESTful fashion. It uses an innovation called "friend in the middle" to turn the proven SSL…

I haven’t always covered all the vCenter, VirtualCenter, and ESX/ESXi updates in the past. Several updates have been released since the last time I did. VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6’s announcement caught my attention because of a fix to uploading files with the datastore browser. This issue has…

Second of the day Synopsis:          VMware vCenter and ESX update release and vMA patch release address multiple security issues in third party components. Issue date:        2010-01-29 Updated on:        2009-11-20 (initial release of advisory) CVE numbers: — JRE — CVE-…

I created a Windows 7 virtual machine in VMware Player, ran it for a while on my Windows notebook, and then decided to move it to one of my Ubuntu machines and host it in VirtualBox. I had no problem copying the folder and files between the different host based hypervisors. VirtualBox can use a…

Another couple of Advisories release today: as usual I will print them out in their entirety. Synopsis:          VMware vCenter update release addresses multiple security issues in Java JRE Issue date:         2010-01-29 Updated on:        2010-01-29 (initial release of…

Apple finally annoumced their tablet officially,dubbed the  iPad. The last months more and more rumors appeared on the internet. You probably wonder why this is interesting for the virtualization community. Although a lot of people over at Gizmodo complain that it’s just an iPhone on steroids. I…

Although many elements are important for designing a storage system that supports a VMware View environment, from a server configuration perspective, planning for proper bandwidth and latency is essential. VMware View environments can occasionally experience peak I/O loads, during which all virtual…

In 2009, VMware published a lot of knowledgebase (KB) articles. However, there were 10 that stood out and were the most popular of 2009. more...

vSphere-Land.com has performed their annual survey and named the Top Virtualization Blogs of 2009. For the complete list, visit vSphere-Land.com or click on the graphic below. And yes, I hope to make the list next year ;-) . more...

Have you watched VMware TV? Well, no, it's not a real TV channel but it is a channel on YouTube where VMware has posted a lot of great videos. There are videos covering VMware View, Cloud Computing, Fusion, technical vSphere videos, and VMworld. You can see them all at VMwareTV .. more...

My first blog contest. I’m starting my first blog contest ever, I am doing this to get some reactivity from you guys… want to reward my blog readers and to increase my RSS subscribers too . I hope that I get your support and I’m asking everybody to participate. As I know people are [...]

Good friend and former co-worker, Ken Oestreich, wrote an interesting article on his blog titled "If you think Converged Infrastructure & Fabrics are niche, guess again". He really gets into the facts about how big name companies like Cisco, HP, IBM, and Egenera are behind the technology and maybe…

#6 Consider Views in Your GUI Application Most developers don’t know much about the View and related managed objects. The reason for that is that they were mainly designed for VI/vSphere Client in the first place. But nothing stops you from using it to your advantages. As you can imagine, you can…

Steve Jin, author of the VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere book, recently started his DoubleCloud blog. In a short time span he produced several high quality posts which should be a must-read for every SDK user. In his latest post, Top 10 Best Practices Using…

The ibm.com developerworks cloud series explores the major types of cloud services and related software that you can use to build Web-scale systems. In Part 1, learn how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds provide basic services you can use to deploy and run your applications. The article also…

The 6 Musts of Intelligent System Automation “This (free-of-charge) (e)book (from rPath) provides a clear, actionable, step-by-step guide to intelligent automation that embeds knowledge, eliminates routine operations, and frees up strategic resources. It shows how IT can deliver the seemingly…

Another post in the dvSwitch series. This time I’ll tackle the creation and use of a private VLANs (PVLAN) on a dvSwitch. For those that are not that familiar with PVLANs have a look at KB1010691, that article gives a good overview of the PVLAN concept. And there were several sessions during the…

Blog Posts from Cycle 8 of the vSphere Blog Contest on ESXi 5 solid entries came in over the last two weeks on our focus topic: ESXi. Below are all five. 1. Ron Singler - Migrating from ESX 3.5 to vSphere and ESXi http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/?p=639 Ron’s post focuses in on an ESXi installation…

Congratulations to Alan Renouf and his post on ESXi entitled "PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi". Alan's entire post can be seen below and also at http://www.virtu-al.net/2010/01/15/powercli-scripting-esxi/ PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi As the service console is moved further away from the hypervisor, people are…

Unified had become a key word today, and what does it really meant for everyone? It is similar as the phenomenal Cloud Computing 2 years ago.  We had seen the storage vendor are moving from FC SAN, ISCSI SAN, NAS to a unified storage today. What a unified storage does today are providing all the…

In respond to the VCE alliance which had been gaining famous in town, NetApp had officially launched the VCN alliance yesterday to provide the 1st secure multi-tenancy solution worldwide to the potential customer. This alliance partnership are slightly different from VCE as there will not be a join…

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An area where Microsoft doesn’t seem particularly active is the so-called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
So far the company made just a few progresses, letting its partner Citrix dominate the scene and compete head to head with VMware.

Rather than on products, Microsoft is…

VMware has just released LCM 1.1. What’s new? VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (LCM) 1.1 release enhances the performance, robustness, and scalability of LCM and resolves a number of known issues. The LCM 1.1 release runs on VMware vCenter Orchestrator 4.0.1. To run LCM 1.1, you must install the…

Now that the Sun acquisition is complete, the Oracle virtualization roadmap is taking shape. The focus will be on integrated management and converged hardware and software.

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And the first release from VMware in 2010 is:  Lifecycle Manager 1.1.  It can be downloaded here. Looks like bug fixes and more scalability. Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes: VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (LCM) 1.1 release enhances the performance, robustness, and…

Everyone knows the situation in where a (s)VMotion asks you to select a Resource Pool. I would love to see that VMware automatically selects the current VM’s Resource Pool but unfortunately we have to make a selection since it defaults to the cluster. When we leave it to default it obviously…

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A couple of days ago Oracle finally announced its Sun merger plan.
virtualization.info reported live about those parts of the announcement that are related to virtualization.

While the company highlighted its commitment to continue investing and offering the Sun virtualization…

This guest post is by well known storage expert, Chris M Evans who writes his own blog on storage and virtualisation at www.thestoragearchitect.com. His blog is an excellent source of storage, virtualization and enterprise information – well worth adding to your browser favourites & RSS feed.  …