Planet V12n

Tweet Author: Rob Jenkins, Director VMware Accelerate Advisory Services EMEA We’ve been talking a lot lately about the software-defined data center (SDDC) as it relates to financial services, information security, and emerging IT cloud careers.  As the Accelerate team meets … Continue reading …

Previous entry: Preview – Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines Next in our Extreme Performance Series mini-track, I’d like to highlight the following vCenter performance breakout.  Remember, you’ll want to attend the whole series to learn about performance across the stack.…

It looks like I’ll be presenting again this year at VMworld in San Francisco.  It’s an honor and I don’t mean that lightly.  Many, many people submit to speak at VMworld and the vast majority don’t get to do it.  It also seems like every year there are fewer and fewer non-VMware people…

Once again I’m proud to announce the release of another TrainSignal course.  This one prepares you for the VMware VCAP5-DCA exam..and let me tell you..it is a monster course.  This one was the longest of all the courses I’ve done but I think the end result is very good. The VCAP5-DCA exam is…

This week’s “Question of the Week” comes from the VMware Certified Professional 5-Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) Official Study Guide. Which of the following cannot be added to a vApp? a. Host b. VM c. Resource Pool d. vService See below … Continue reading →

David presenting.jpgI was so busy with activities at HP Discover, that the only session I had time to attend is one I co-presented with my pal and colleague Stephen Spellicy - session TB2838, Delivering data protection for your own virtualized private cloud - in case it gets posted to the HP…

One important goal of my blog is to provide useful information/instructions and educate on technically challenging topics. I am very happy that I found a partner that is driven by the same motivation!

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By talking about SanDisk, my first thought goes to the “consumer” market of the flash cards, where it’s well know. Some of my SD memory cards are from this company, but probably their products are “hidden” in a lot of other devices. But SanDisk it’s not only flash cards, considering that…

Mid-Market businesses face several challenges when implementing virtualization and cloud computing technology: limited IT budgets, mobile accessibility and security, scalability, and limited resources to plan for, adopt and learn new technology solutions. Choosing the right vendor to meet these…

 If you working on your VCDX design or thinking about taking a shot at it, you will want to consider reading VCDX Boot Camp from VMware Press. This is a short focused book that gives to a little bit of a look at the process leading up to and on the day of your design [...]

The post Book Review –…

Enhanced Mitigation Experience ToolkitMicrosoft has released a final version of Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 4.0 (EMET). A mitigation technology is protection against attackers, where a malicious code cannot be executed to infect Windows systems. EMET can act at different levels. At…

During my recent trip to the headquarters of PernixData I had the opportunity to pick the brains of Satyam and some of the key engineers. Throughout the discussions and lectures I learned a lot about the design choices engineering faced when creating the Flash Virtualization Platform. When dealing…

By Jim Zhang, VMWare Professional Services Consultant VMware has had a dogfood tradition since previous CEO Paul Maritz’ instilled the practice of having VMware IT deploy VMware products for production use internally. As a VMware employee personally, I can understand some … Continue reading →

The London VMware User Group (VMUG) is meeting in an independence day extravaganza  on the 4th July 2013 at: London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street London, EC4R 1AP It doesn’t cost anything to attend and is a full day event stuffed to the gills with interesting content and…

  Voonami, Inc., is located in Utah and offers services ranging from traditional co-location to fully hosted, managed cloud applications. Voonami is helping their enterprise customers transition from private cloud to hybrid cloud by simplifying the provisioning and replication of … Continue…

The iron man of IT events, Tech Field Day#9, is once again rearing its head and challenging both presenters and delegates alike with a brutal gauntlet of an intense, three day information fire hose. This will be my fourth time at such an event, so I hope to draw upon my past training, breathing…

For many years now, VMware customers have been using Nested Virtualization, which is the ability to run a hypervisor such as vSphere ESXi within a virtual machine. Even though Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, customers have come to rely upon this technology for their lab…

By Melissa Saegert Elicker, social media editor, HP Storage

MSE.jpgDiscover momentum reached peak speed on Thursday (can this really be the last day already?) with a rich roster of storage-focused session. Here’s a quick snapshot of several sessions I attended -- with a business and technical…

Nutanix is a virtualization infrastructure company located in San Jose, California. Nutanix’s mission is to virtualize a datacenter without the need for a SAN. While traditional datacenter architecture employed discrete tiers of servers and storage, which are typically connected via a SAN, Nutanix…

By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). This confusion is one reason why enterprises have been slow to adopt PaaS. Why is there so much confusion? Because…

vCenter Log Insight is a new log aggregator from VMware. As a new tool that is integrated with vCenter Operations Manager, Log Insight has great potential. The ability to tie in directly with VMware's knowledge base, vCenter and vCenter Operations gives Log Insight a true strength in combining…

I needed to register a Storage Provider for vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) today. I force myself to use the vSphere Web Client and it had me looking for this option for a couple of minutes. It actually was the second time this week I had to do this, so I figured if … … …

Since 2004 the Netherlands has an official VMware User Group, the Dutch VMUG. The initiative to start the Dutch VMUG came from employees of XTG, a company which does IT-training. The mission statement is: The Dutch VMware User Group (VMUG) program is designed to encourage and support the Dutch…

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GFM2HX2R7k

This blog post highlights the technical difference on how vCenter SRM4 and SRM5 do failover with Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform (HDS VSP). Credits to Saravanan Mahalingam for delivering this information. SRM 4 SRM4 does not support failback operation SRM4 uses horctakeover command for…

In the previous part we have set up all prerequisites necessary for the vCloud Automation Center. We can now proceed with the installation and configuration. Install vCAC Navigate to the extracted installation zip folder and from the Setup folder, execute vCAC-Server-Setup file. Accept the EULA.…

At Citrix Synergy this year, I had the opportunity to speak with Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO at Bromium. Though Bromium didn't have a booth at this year's event, I've discovered on more than one occasion that Crosby and I have a knack for finding one another in a crowd of a few thousand people.…

featured-loginsight

Last week VMware released an update on vCenter Operations Manager, version 5.7.1 is now available. This latest version includes some new features like the Performance Report Pack, Launch in Context, standard vSphere Dashboards in the custom UI and integration with vCenter Log…

As of June 15th 2013 there is an Official Dutch VMware User Group. This official VMUG is part of the world wide international VMUG organization and controlled by a board of VMware users called the Customer Council. In Dutch: Vanaf 15 juni gaat de Customer Council verder met de Nederlandse VMUG onder…

Last month I switched from iPhone to Android. I don't want to start a religious battle about why, rather, I want to share the MAM-like security scheme I've put in place and see if it might make sense in other scenarios. First a bit of background information...(read more)<img><img>

The ballots have been counted and the 2013 vEXPERTS were announced in a VMTN blog post by John Troyer.  I was fortunate enough to be awarded this honorable designation for a fifth consecutive year (I’m going to link that Five Timers club skit from SNL because I still get a laugh out of it). …

An exciting new product was just announced last week by VMware called vCenter Log Insight, which will be part of the vCenter Operations Management Suite when released. The announcement also includes a public beta for customers to try out the new log analytics product that allows administrators to…

Blogger Coffee Talk.jpgI'm back home and while HP Discover was exhausting, I wish we were still there in the company of the 30+ independent bloggers we hosted.  I had a great time with them and as always is the case, meeting with such a smart group of bloggers helps me to think deeper. 

Blogger…

This year at VMworld (both San Francisco and Barcelona) performance will be front and center.  I’ve been working internally to create a “mini-track” of technically advanced performance breakouts with many of our actual performance engineers as speakers.  Customers always want … Continue…

Do you use VMware Auto Deploy? Is there a good reason you don’t use VMware Auto Deploy? Here at VMware we value our customers feedback and want to help make sure our product lines and features are in line with … Continue reading →

Background
VMware Blast installs on the Connection server, not the Security server, but Blast gets available from the Security server after installing it on the connection server. Blast provides clientless access to VMware View desktops through HTML5 instead of PCoIP/RDP/RGS.


Problem
After…

The “Instant VMware View Virtualization How-to”  is an eBook with practical, step-by-step instructions and explanations for some important and useful tasks based on VMware Horizon View. It is written by Ramesh Geddam and Prasenjit Sarkar. The eBook contains the following chapters: Instant…

Background
VMware has a nice whitepaper called Windows 7 and Windows 8 Optimization Guide for Horizon View Virtual Desktops and it also includes a script (in several editions) based on the recommendations described in this paper. This script is meant to be run in the parent image and it will…

Approximately 10 days ago I launched the new revamped VDI calculator, now using Java Framework, and I am now introducing the Release 2.0 with full support to XenDesktop calculations for VDI environments running on atop VMware vSphere hypervizor. Why? Because most Citrix XenDesktop deployments run…

Deploying a new VMware vCenter Virtual Appliance today, I received the error ” Failed to communicate with the vCenter Single Sign On server https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:7444…. ” This error has the same resolution as my previous article Failed to connect to VMware Lookup Service Failed to…

A little while back I have published blog posts and videos describing what a Desktop-as-a-Service architecture should look like. I was wrong! Well, let me put this way – there are multiple truths to the matter.   In a previous article I said that DaaS solutions should oblige the following…

Improved operational efficiency is certainly a compelling motivation for deploying a dynamic on-demand private cloud infrastructure. In fact, the automated service delivery capabilities of VMware’s cloud automation software have improved VMware customer’s operational efficiency by an average of…

<img>The Rough Cuts service from VMware Press gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

We’ve already mentioned Madeira Cloud, a Beijing-based cloud startup focused on “IDE” for AWS, as a company with an interesting new approach to common problems related to configuration and...

Ever since VMware started selling View as a desktop solution, we’ve had these discussions with colleagues and customers. You probably are familiar with the topic: Many companies have more than one location, but they all want to manage their IT infrastructure as if it was one. So, if we can throw…

  Problem Statement With Allocation Pool VDC and with 100% memory reservation, we still cannot use the entire VM memory reservation allocated. This is due to the “by design” problem of having VM memory overhead in vSphere. That means if you reserve 100% of memory for your Allocation Pool, you…

A few weeks ago I saw on an internal email thread an ask from a customer via their VMware sale engineer. The customer was using AutoDeploy and Host Profiles. As part of this process, they were creating a local user … Continue reading →

It’s that time already! The winners of my “Score Awesome Swag – The TrainSignal IT Survival Kit Giveaway“ are being announced today. I’ve fired off five emails: one to the grand prize winner receiving the TrainSignal branded IT Survival Kit and 30 days of free online training from…

Late last week saw the arrival of a long-awaited new NAS, the Synology DS1813+. This unit will replace my extremely old ReadyNAS NVX. I am now in the process of migrating data from the old box to the new one. Once that is complete, I will have some more information to share in a series of posts in…

While designing for vSphere Auto Deploy you may want to group (categorize) your ESXi Hosts and attach a deploy rule (rule set) to them: You specify the behavior of the Auto Deploy server by using a set of rules written in Power CLI. The Auto Deploy rule engine checks the rule set for matching…

Categories: Cool Stuff!, News, Virtualization, VMware Tags: RVC, vSphere As of lately I’ve been playing around with some of the many management tools and that are available from VMware. One nifty tool that I’ve decided to start using a bit more due to top secret reasons is the Ruby vSphere Console…

As you all might have noticed on twitter or other social media, there are some changes happening at the NL VMUG. You ll might know the NL VMUG from the yearly VMUG event and the different smaller workshops they organize … Continue reading →

What is VMware Virsto and What Does it Do? Since VMware’s acquisition of Virsto earlier this year, many customers and folks in the community have expressed a great deal of interest in the product. Since so many folks have requested … Continue reading →

The server-side caching space is definitely an area that I have been paying a lot of attention to for accelerating virtualized workloads. Beyond the cool factor, the idea of accelerating IO at the server layer seems like a smart play for any IT shop looking to extend their capital investment in…

In our effort to provide our viewers with up to the minute information on VMware related news and topics, we’re posting the following list of new KB Entries for this week, direct from VMware Support. Socialcast On Premise v2 Searching application or worker logs for actions and errors in Socialcast…

TweetI’m working with a customer to refresh his VMware infrastructure. At the moment, the platform is based on ESX 3.5 and vCenter 2.5, so it’s pretty old. The upgrade phase is not going to be a problem, but the customer in the past has followed too much some old reccomendations, and has made a…

OSPsI got few questions recently concerning VMware Tools. Usually Installation of VMware tools is easy process. Few clicks in the vSphere client and you install the VMware tools automatically or interactively. There is a third supported way to install VMware tools.  In case you want to do a manual…

Back in April of this year we released the video: Accessing VMware Downloads through My VMware. The My VMware portal was updated last week and some new features were introduced. One such change in this new release was that of … Continue reading →

You have configured Jumbo Frames in your VMware infrastructure and want to verify if everything is working well? No problem – you can do this with the command vmkping. But you should take care how to use this command. First some basics about Jumbo Frames: (if you know them – read on below) •…

Recently when I was in Las Vegas for HP Discover I realized that the Venetian/Palazo complex is really a cloud: Vegas as a Service. IT could learn alot from Las Vegas actually and I think that each hotel complex is a private cloud and that taken together the strip is one big cloud. Granted it is a…

The following content is in Spanish, the language in which the webinar is presented. El pasado 13 de junio 2013 en ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag LATAM @elnemesisdivina presentó el tema #VCAP DCA 6.2 – Troubleshoot Memory Performance Recursos y respuestas a algunas preguntas del público durante…

Having installed vCenter 5.1 U1a, it was time to replace certificates. Using the vCenter Certificate Automation Tool to replace self-signed SSL certificates with full certificates you will be taken through various menus to replace each certificate: When the time comes to replace the vCenter Server…

When I see my proposals being accepted at VMworld… my ego typically gives way to fear and anxiety.

Attendees invest time, money and their expectations are (rightly so) very high. I usually hate going on stage and look dumb (it happens). More so at VMworld.

So . . . → Read More: My vCHS sessions…

Those who follow me on twitter probably have seen me “moaning” about the Dutch VMUG for a long time now. For years the Dutch VMUG was not a VMUG like any other VMUG in the world. Yes we had HUGE event in the Netherland every year with over 700 attendees, but it was a commercial … … Continue…

In this video you will see the integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform. VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and the vCenter Web Cleint. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to…

A customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped…

During the last Dell Enterprise Forum, Dell announced a further differentiation to the range of converged infrastructure solutions to help businesses of all sizes to address common issues related to complexity, inefficiency and rigidity of the existing IT infrastructure. The new solution…

Today I got a reminder of a post I have been meaning to write about security best practices and VMware Virtual Appliances.

A question was raised on the VMTN community VCSA - what is the default "upgrade" user for?

VMTN question

That is a very legitimate question!! Giving a user all rights with no…

Having successfully installed OpenStack all-in-one with PackStack, I started to try out the multi-node deployment. It ended up much longer time than I thought because of various issues mainly with networking. The following summarizes what I did to make it work, and some tricks and tips I found out…

In vCC 2.0, we saw a parallel copy operation which could consume more time to copy a VM from On-Prem Datacenter to the Cloud Datacenter.   However, now with the release of VMware vCloud Connector 2.5, VMware brings a new feature and that is path optimization UDP based Data Transfer … Continue…

Cormac Hogan wrote a good article, VAAI-NAS – Some snapshot chains are deeper than others. The blog post highlights some of the differences between vendors and the impact of their decisions. Nutanix doesn’t have a max chain depth. If you want to take 50,000 snaps, go knock yourself out. Nutanix…

Veeam 6.5 Cloud Edition has many nice features.  It includes the award winning Veeam Backup and Recovery and then adds a second application to replicate those backups to offsite storage — such as Google Cloud Storage. Veeam does a great job of performing disk-to-disk backups of virtual machines,…

In one of my recent VDI projects I was working with Symantec Endpoint Protection as the choice of AV solution. When I started working on the project I was not able to find much information on the exact steps required for me to design and implement a Horizon View solution with Symantec Endpoint…

I blogged before about pfSense, the Open Source FreeBSD-based router and firewall appliance that I use in my hosted virtual lab (SBHVL) to implement IPv6-capable routing and firewalling and connecting two hosts through an OpenVPN tunnel.
I use the current development branch pfSense…

VMware VDP as a solution, when deployed in firewalled environment, needs some ports to be opened in order to function properly. Here is a list of ports that are used by vSphere Data Protection (VDP) 5.1. Note that there are some ports that are used in the VDP VDP advanced. Those are ports 28001 and…

I’m honored to join the ranks of the vExpert community for the 3rd consecutive year, which has now grown to a thriving 581 members.  I wanted to take a brief moment to share a few thoughts about the program. INGREDIENTS What does it take to build such a community?  In the earlier part of my

I’m delighted to let you know that the TechTalks have their first two confirmed sponsors for 2013, Infinio and Nutanix have both confirmed sponsorship.  This is the start of the road to this year’s awesomeness. As luck would have it both Infinio and Nutanix are presenting at Tech Field Day 9…

The primary motivations for becoming vExpert certainly should not be related to any possible benefits of the program. And once confirmed (for me is the fourth year in a row) you have to think more about what you can give rather to what is to be expected. But I’d be a hypocrite to deny that [...]

Virtualization products comparisons are almost common, but usually are too much (single) vendor oriented and each try to bring better conclusion on its products. So it’s difficult find something that it’s really independent. Also customer experiences could be polarized by their knowledge and the…

Cisco Live is a vendor event evolved out of the Networkers conferences that began in 1989. Now it offers an unparalleled combination of education and training on the latest technologies and trends; testing and certification on Cisco products; and the opportunity for attendees to extend their…

vSphere Replication was introduced with vSphere 5.0 and SRM 5.0 providing a way for customers without the ability to leverage storage array replication to utilize Site Recovery Manager (SRM) within their environments as their disaster recovery solution. With the release of vSphere 5.1 vSphere…

I could have written this post. T-Minus 14 days till the immanent demise of Google Reader, a product I’ve used for a number of years on a daily basis for simple consumption of media. Sad Fact: I have google reader open all day and will reference it dozens of times during the day. It is [...]

Building on the great feedback from the May 29th US #vBrownBag, Jon Harris will be scheduling several more including sessions on: Basic Install and Config of vCAC Install and Config for vCAC Endpoints/Agents (vCenter and vCD) Configuring Provisioning Groups, Blue Prints (vCenter/vCD), and Build…

Get to VMworld San Francisco early and take advantage of these pre-conference training courses at 20% off the regular price. These special course offerings are your chance to hone your skills with VMware solutions, meet the experts behind VMware products, … Continue reading →

I'm a mog – half man, half dog – I'm my own best friend. - Barf (John Candy) from Spaceballs VMworld content catalog is live The votes have been tallied and the results are in!  VMworld has officially released the 2013 Content Catalog for both the US and  Europe conferences.  This is always…

vCloud Director learning videoThere is a new 40 min video at Backup Academy website maintained by Veeam, which explains what vCloud Director is and why it’s interesting even for smaller shops to go and look at it as a possibility to build applications that are executed on remote locations – in…

While installing a fresh vCenter 5.1 recently I was presented with this really helpful error message at the point where you are registering a vCenter Server administrator user or group with vCenter Single Sign On: Wrong input – either a command line argument is wrong, a file cannot be found or the…

By: Kurt Milne I didn’t wake up yesterday thinking, “Today I’ll design a T-shirt for the DevOps Days event in Mountain View.”  But as it turns out – that is what happened. Some thoughts on what went into my word … Continue reading →

TweetRecently on the Italian VMware Community (VMTN), a user asked a simple question: with ESXi 5.1 support for Windows NT4 has been suspended, can I still run this operating system in the latest ESXi releases? In these days vSphere still supports a huge list of “historic” operating systems,…

While installing vCenter 5.1 recently I experienced the following error at the point where you confirm the AD account to use for the vCenter service: Failed to verify the service account. Error code: [87] At first I figured I was mis-entering the credentials, but it turns out to be an issue if the…

At first glance the Dell PowerEdge VRTX looks like a small blade chassis. Look deeper and you will see a ton of potential in this software-defined world.

Summary: Running SnapDrive or SnapManager on Windows 2003? You might have some decisions to make…. Netapp recently announced that ONTAP 8.2 will bring with it a new licencing model which impacts the SnapDrive and SnapManager suites. Unfortunately this could have significant impact on companies…

With vSphere 5.0 VMware changed the way Mem.MinFreePct worked. I had briefly explained Mem.MinFreePct in a blog post a long time ago. Basically Mem.MinFreePct, pre vSphere 5.0, was the percentage of memory set aside by the VMkernel to ensure there are always sufficient system resources available. I…

It is really cool to see more and more customers show interest in running Apple Mac OS X on vSphere. Just the other day there was another interesting question that was raised from a customer asking whether vSphere Data Protection (VDP) would be able to backup and restore Mac OS X guests. …

In my continuing series on reducing the friction to make frequently performed tasks easier, I take a look at some ways using keyboard shortcuts can help.

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

Hosts John Mark Troyer, VMware @jtroyer Guests David Davis, TrainSignal @davidmdavis Martin Klaus, VMware @mklausvm Spiros Xanthos, VMware @spirosx News Don’t miss VMworld 2013 (10th annual) Become a Virtual Design Master Challenge – Participant Today VMworld Content Catalog  VMware…

A few days ago VMware has published the new version 4.2 of Horizon Mirage. With that they’ve also published a new Knowledge Base article with best practices which can be found here: Best practices for upgrading VMware Mirage (2031711). My colleagues Sascha & Tim have already updated their test…

Forgive the catchy title…

Well this morning I thought that I had missed something (which I usually don't) - and that Paul Strong was appointed as the new CTO succeeding Stephen Herrod.

What made me come to that conclusion you might ask - it was this article.

New CTO

Performing a reality check on …

Foursquare to write to a GMail calendar Quandary As a consultant I spend much of my working days flitting around the country on customer engagements extolling the virtues of all things virtualisation and Cloud. And drinking tea. I use my corporate MS Outlook calendar to make a note of my whereabouts…

Over the past few month Veeam announced a lot of new features coming with Veeam Backup & Replication v7. One exciting feature coming with v7 is eg. “Virtual Lab for VMware Replicas”, which will offer a lot of great opportunities for your daily work. But there is another key innovation which is…

It is a common misunderstanding that, if you buy software licenses you can do anything with it. You will not become the owner of it, you only get the use right of the software under STRICT CONDITIONS. What you may or may not do with Microsoft software is recorded to the smallest details by Microsoft…

Eight years ago I sat in a hotel in Dublin and listened to Jeroen van de Kamp and Dennis Damen talk about a tool they were building called " Project Scheveningen ," something more commonly known as "reverse seamless windows." You all know what seamless...(read more)<img><img>

The VCAP-DTD exam is quite similar, in the format, as the VCAP-DCD one, with lot of questions (115 questions!), composed by multiple choice, drag and drop, scenario questions, along with some “visio” style design questions. The total time for this exam is 195 minutes (with the usual 30 min.…

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1425031 PALO ALTO, Calif. — HP today announced new and enhanced HP ProLiant servers that help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) accelerate business results by simplifying the deployment, management and maintenance of their IT…

Following the back to back VMUG’s in San Diego and Silicon Valley, I found myself a week later back in my home town of Seattle, WA.  This trip was especially fun because it was a mini-reunion for several members of Team #vDB. I met up with Jason Langer, Josh Atwell, and Peter Chang. Peter leads…

I was not sure if I would write up anything about failing to pass my first VCDX defense panel, but since you don’t hear much about misses. I wanted to let people know that it happens more than you think. Anyway these are some of the things that I encountered in my journey. Location: In [...]

The…

As an SMB, it’s important to leverage IT resources in the most cost-effective and efficient manner. While recent studies show that more SMBs are taking advantage of the cloud and its opportunity of increased agility and reduced costs, there are … Continue reading →

If you’re taking on a vSphere design project, VMware vSphere: Design Workshop will help you learn available design alternatives and give you the tools needed to make sound design decisions. In this three-day workshop, you’ll have an opportunity to practice … Continue reading →

Hey EveryOne! vNoob Back to hopefully drop a couple of knowledge bombs on you. Powershell/PowerCLI is really good at giving you the information you ask for…however, it isn’t always easy to know what to ask or how to ask. Hopefully these tips will help you get more of the information you want…

On May 30th, we hosted our monthly #CloudOpsChat on “Reaching Common Ground When Defining Services.” Thanks to all who participated for making it an informative and engaging conversation. We would also like to thank John Dixon (@GreenPagesIT) from GreenPages and … Continue reading →

For those of you who are involved in the architecture of Horizon View environments, I'm sure you this is a question you've always asked, but may have only ever got the response of "VMware doesn't support that design". Why doesn't VMware support this design? It works….most of the time? During my…

By: Chris Colotti This is a repost from Chris Colotti’s blog, chriscolotti.us.  So I decided to let the dust settle a little bit after last month’s VMware Hybrid Cloud Service announcement before I posted something this week.  I wanted to coordinate this post with the upcoming … …

Tony Huynh, Product Management End-User Computing It gives me great pleasure to announce that the VMware Horizon View 5.2 Microsoft Lync 2013 VDI Client Installation/Configuration Guide is now publicly available. The document provides a step-by-step guide on how to deploy … Continue reading →

If you have already took the effort to build your vCenter Single Sign On server while upgrading to vSphere 5.1, then it might be worth while to benefit of it to unify your login to vCloud Director. Wouldn’t be nice if you don’t have to enter your credential separately for vCloud Director after…

I have been discussing Software Defined Storage for a couple of months now and I have noticed that many of you are passionate about this topic as well. One thing that stood out to me during these discussion is that the focus is on the “storage system” itself. What about the network in between…

Nick Fritsch gives us an overview of Deep Security and vCNS including a live demo. #vBrownBag Follow-up Deep Security and vCNS with Nick Fritsch (@nfritsch) from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo. Get your vBrownBags on iTunes or RSS

A customer of mine could not use VMware vSphere Update Manager after some changes in the Active Directory. They could not enable the vSphere Update Manager plug-in. The icon of VUM disappeared. I solved this by doing the steps below: Navigate to the folder: C:\Program Files…

I just returned from attending the Cloud Expo in New York City this week. The conference was dominated by private and hybrid cloud topics. There were several private Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors attending whom I spent a great deal of time talking to as I walked the floor. It seems these days…

On June 11, VMware announced their entry into the fast growing log management market. VMware vCenter Log Insight is an exciting new offering in analytics-based IT Operations. It delivers superior technology for automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search, and an easy to…

Microsoft released a very important bug fix which could solve issues for many customers. In short all sort of issues can happen when using Windows Server 2012 in combination with clustering, SMB shares or CSV volumes. Some issues are initiated by backup processes or snapshotting. These issues are…

This is a guest post by Graham French Putting the power into PowerCLI Working in the world of virtualization, you meet some tough challenges. Some you’ve seen before, most of them are the first and last time you’ll ever encounter them. This particular challenge was new to me. How to shut down…

ESXi Firewall Inbound traffic ruleThis article will show you in few steps how-to turn your ESXi host into NTP server. It’s not the best VMware practice for production environments, but excellent for home labbing and maybe for clients with single ESXi host, where there isn’t any other physical…

Propalms, a provider of server-based computing technology based on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, hypervisor-based VDI and enterprise remote... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Its a long time since I did not even talk about the converged infrastructure and what is happening around us in this technology space. Yes, I have moved to #SDDC and thus those did not matter much to me off late. However yesterday when I saw this note from my … Continue reading →

The US VMworld 2013 Content Catalog is available since yesterday! You can browse the catalog with all available sessions here. The catalog contains detailed information about the sessions, the speakers and the available Hands-on-Labs, too. The US VMworld 2013 will be held in San Francisco from…

By Melissa Saegert Elicker, social media editor, HP Storage

MSE.jpgWednesday was time to get down to business at HP Discover with a full line up of sessions that together are telling a compelling story about how HP is accelerating the next era of storage.

In no particular order, here’s a…

BriForum 2013 Chicago is right around the corner, taking place from July 30‒ August 1 this year. Registration is now open, and if you register before Friday June 14 (Flag day in the US!) then you can save $100 via our early bird discount . BriForum 2013...(read more)<img><img>

Last week a colleague of ours was tied up in troubleshooting a VMware environment with a vCenter Server. It  failed authenticating through LDAP with the Windows Domain. He was demoting two old domain controllers from the Windows domain which became obsolete after creating new virtual machines to…

I’ve got the opportunity to take the VCAP5-DTD exam during the beta period (at the beginning of this year). After a really long period (common in the VMware beta exams, but this time more long that usual), on May 16 I’ve received an email with this sentence: Thank you for taking the VCAP-DTD…

Amazingly easy, once you realize where to look.

From Synergy 2013: DesktopPlayer for Mac, a type-2 hypervisor that enables Windows virtual machines to run on the Mac.

The Petri IT Knowledgebase is looking for writers and bloggers who are experts in Microsoft System Center and VMware products.

Here is a short summary with links on today's announcements from the Red Hat summit in Boston.

Red Hat Launches Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 brings a vast array of new features, including:

• Fully supported Storage Live Migration, allowing virtual machine…

While trying to setup the Redhat Linux machine with two interfaces to install vCloud Director into it, I had some funny problem with my network cards configuration. I have not installed vCloud Director yet at that time, so I was sure it is some Redhat Linux or networking problem rather than vCloud…

VMware started VMware Technical Journal back in March 2012, as a new online publication with the purpose of raising the awareness among its customer and prospects about the new R&D...

  Back in April at the OpenStack Summit, VMware had the opportunity to highlight its leadership in OpenStack Networking.  I presented a deep dive technical session about VMware’s network virtualization technology, and Sachin Thakkar demonstrated how VMware technology enables advanced … …

I sincerely hope this saves somebody else some time because I had a fair amount of head scratching with this today. Installed a Windows Server 2012 VM on vSphere 5.0 U2, pretty standard install with a C:\ drive for OS, Software etc and D:\ for data. This particular server needed to run SQL Server…

This is a guest post from vCloud Service Provider Logicworks. Check out their blog, Gathering Clouds. Nowadays, there is so much being written about the future of cloud computing, especially in terms of the virtues of choosing public or private. … Continue reading →

Here's a quick list of some resources for networking and network virtualization. Feel free to add your own resources in the comments!

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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Yesterday we had our press conference and finally sent public with our news.  It's a proud moment for a lot us here who have been working toward the announcements we made yesterday and also a day of relief.  In my blog post yesterday talking about the new all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 and…

Applying advanced settings to VMs can be a daunting task. Without scripting, you’ll have to: Power each VM down Edit settings of each VM Manually enter values When dealing with even a few VMs, this can be a very time consuming task. Enter PowerCLI – the script below will apply advanced settings…

vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 is the latest release of VMware's integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

Test your knowledge of VMware NSX, which evolved rapidly out of VMware's homegrown and acquired network virtualization technologies.

Plain and simple: Apache Hadoop has become the technology disrupter that is sending every enterprise into overdrive to get up to speed on and figure out how to exploit their data. Adoption is accelerating at 60% a year, yet 26% … Continue reading →

Today we have a new video which is specifically geared towards users of our Consumer Desktop products including VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion. This video tutorial discusses and demonstrates how you can use VMware Workstation virtual machines in VMware Fusion. … Continue reading →

TweetAs Dr. Egon Spengler said in the Ghostbusters movie, “Don’t cross the streams. It’s would be BAD” It happens at times to talk with some customers, thinking about the possibility to save the backups of their VMs right into the same SAN where they are used to execute them. If in the past…

At the end of May, VMware announced the new VMware vExpert class of 2013. There were 581 vExperts named which is the largest group so far in the 5 year history of the program. On an interesting side note, of these 581 vExperts, there are forty two of them that were part of the original 300 in the…

When deploying vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), it is automatically associated with the vCenter Server from which it was deployed from and this behavior is by design. This means if you have two vCenter Servers, you will need to deploy two separate VIN instances, one for each vCenter Server as…

Most of you have probably seen the announcement Frank did yesterday… Frank, Cormac, Vaughn and I are working on this book project called “Tweet sized vSphere Design Considerations” and we need YOU, the community, to contribute! What are you saying? You are writing a book and want us to do the…

On the 12th of March 2013 Pietro Piutti covered VCP5-IaaS Objective 5 on the EMEA vBrownbag. The video from the session is below: EMEA vBrownbag with Pietro Piutti covering VCP5-IaaS Objective 5 from EMEA vBrownbag on Vimeo.

On the 11th of June 2013 Andrea Mauro covered VCAP5-CIA Objective 1 – Configure and Maintain vCloud Director on the EMEA vBrownbag. The slides from the session can be found here and the video from the session is below: EMEA vBrownbag with Andrea Mauro covering VCAP5-CIA Objective 1 – Configure…

Liquidware Labs UNPLUGGED, Raw footage of ProfileUnity and Stratusphere pending upcoming releases! You saw it here first!...

On the 4th of June 2013 Jonas Rosland covered Puppet and Razor Fundamentals on the EMEA vBrownbag. The slides from the session can be found here and the video from the session is below: Puppet & Razor Fundamentals with Jonas Rosland from EMEA vBrownbag on Vimeo.

VMware offers BETA courses to those wanting to participate in finalizing the near complete course and you save 50% off the course price.  Register today as BETA courses fill up quickly. VMware vCloud Automation Center [V5.2] – BETA Location: Frimley, … Continue reading →

I’m delighted to be involved in an upcoming project on vSphere Design Considerations. This is the brain-child of my ex-colleague, Frank Denneman, who recently fu^H^H decided to broaden his horizons and join an interesting new start-up called PernixData. Also on Continue reading →

VMware vCenter Log Insight User InterfaceA public beta product called vCenter Log Insight can be downloaded and tested. I’ve downloaded and installed this product in my lab. The install/configure takes at most 5 minutes of your time. The product currently in public beta, is going to be licensed…

I've already posted how you can watch our storage press conference in a few hours from now so be sure to tune in at 8:30 AM PDT to hear all the news!  I'll certainly have a few blog posts over the next few days helping sort out all of the news. 

One of the things I'm excited to see at HP…

VMware VDPLast week new update has been released for VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP). As you can doubt, new maintenance release for both VDP products has been released. Those releases are mainly fixing bugs related to both products. If you’re concerned and running your backup solution on VDP,…

As a Cisco/NetApp FlexPod Partner we deploy a lot of FlexPods with all kinds of workloads. One of the more populair applications of aFlexPod is a VMware View environment. One of the tools to execute a valid and correctly configured FlexPod is a CVD, a Cisco Validated Design. Looking for the latest…

By Melissa Saegert Elicker, social media editor, HP Storage

3PAR2_again.jpgIt it’s June in Las Vegas, it must be HP Discover. I’m lucky enough to be here this week to attend some keynotes and sessions and share what I learn with you. 

As things kicked off today, I attended the Innovation…

VMTurbo has announced the new release of Operarion Manager, now in v4.0 with new foundational features and a modular approach to controlling all layers of the virtualized data center via extensions. Operations Manager already can find how your resouces are used and improve their utilization, for…

By Kate Davis, @KateAtHP, WW Product Marketing Manager, HP StoreVirtual Storage

KateDavis.jpgMany marketing campaigns over the years have touted the power of “and” within their product. Because no one wants to choose between two or more things, the ability to have all features is meaningful.…

Gurusimran Khalsa is the featured vBrownBag Presenter this week. Gurusimran, aka GS, is a Senior Consulting Engineer for Presidio. He has presented multiple times for the vBrownBag podcasts on the topics of Security as well as VCAP Exam experiences. In his free time, GS is one of the leaders of the…

VMware has unveiled vCenter Log Insight, an analytics tool that helps admins measure and analyze the status of their physical and virtual IT infrastructures.

VMTurbo today released version 4.0 of its virtualization management platform Operations Manager. This release is the follow up of version 3.3 which was released in February this year. Version 4.0...

At the beginning of March VMware has released their new Horizon Suite which includes the End User Computing products Horizon View, Horizon Mirage and Horizon Workspace. The suite is a full solution for the complete end user computing stack, from physical to virtual. With this release VMware also has…

Recently, after a View upgrade, I had problems connecting to my VMware View desktops. I would try to connect to my VMs but I was met with a black screen. The login screen would never show up and I had no idea because it was working fine before.

A quick google search brings up quote a few KBs:

…

Today VMware Technical Journal (VMTJ) is celebrating its first birthday! VMTJ is a VMware Labs journal with in depth technical information which is published twice per year. Today VMware Labs published a new version of the the 2013 Summer edition of the VMware Technical Journal. It is available as a…

VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hydrid Services acronym…

This week’s “Question of the Week” comes from the VMware Certified Professional 5-Datacenter Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) Official Study Guide. What is the maximum amount of memory that can be assigned to a Version 8 virtual machine? a. 2TB b. 256GB c. … Continue reading →

For mid-market companies, it’s important to ensure that the demand for cloud doesn’t drive you to take on unnecessary costs and waste precious resources. However, with the new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, you can combine the power of the public … Continue reading →

Today VMware has introduced the world to VMware vCenter Log Insight, labeling it as a "new automated log management and analytics product for the cloud era".  In my opinion this is a great next step for VMware's management portfolio and if integrated correctly, could really compliment the…

It's no secret that going forward, VMware's new vSphere Web Client will be the primary graphical interface for interacting with vSphere and other solutions within the vCloud Suite. This is regardless of whether the interface is using FLEX, HTML5 or some other framework, that is not the the topic of…

This blog post is really a drama. The location is the IT department of a medium sized or enterprise business, the characters are Infrastructure Administrators. Any resemblance to real persons and incidents is by far not coincidental, but fully intended.

Read more »<img>

Today we are kicking off a new blog series called “Network Virtualization In Action” where we bring you the voice of the customer discussing their deployments or decisions around network virtualization. Now it goes without saying that Japan has always been … Continue reading →

As you know the EMEA edition of #vBrownbag has started and it has covered the VCP on the Cloud and the EUC (or DT) path and some VCAP (for more information, see the full list of certification paths and my session at the #vBrownbag at VMworld). The next scheduled session is dedicated at VCAP5-CIA…

For those of you getting your feet wet with our new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service platform, we have the following Knowledgebase articles ready to help you get started. You are now armed to tackle the future. Adding, removing, and modifying … Continue reading →

Bromium today released version 2.0 of its Security product based on the Xen hypervisor called vSentry. vSentry is a security product which uses a so called Microvisor which is a...

Wait!  I thought I had UPS plugged into my host and setup as passthru to my VM already!  Why can't I see it now?  What happened?  Who moved that external drive I had connected to my Veeam console to seed an offsite backup?  Ever find yourself asking yourself any of these questions…I certainly…

We just noticed, thanks to a tweet by Eric Sloof, that VMware’s new product for log management and analysis, VMware vCenter Log Insight, is now available in an Open Beta program....

The Potomac Regional VMware User Conference is just a couple days away.  We still have room for more attendees, so we are offering a Refer-A-Friend reward for folks who get their IT associates to come out to our awesome, free, full-day customer-focused event. The day will offer in-depth technical…

By: Kevin Lees Last time, I wrote about the challenge of transforming a traditional IT Ops culture and the value of knowing what you’re up against. Now I want to suggest some specific organizational changes that – given those cultural … Continue reading →

7450 at Discover small.jpgIt's guaranteed to be a busy week for HP Storage at Discover and we kicked off the fun this morning with our press conference.  Let me briefly tell you about what we announced and we'll dive deeper into the details over the next few weeks. 

HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450

A…

I know many of you must have not noticed this anomaly in the vCD UI while creating your Org VDC. So what am I talking about here. Well, we all know that there are three Allocation models in the VMware vCloud Director right? And one of the model is Pay-As-You-Go. … Continue reading →

By Jeremy Wheeler, VMWare Professional Services Consultant As Ted and Mason mentioned in their video post last week, today’s IT staff faces many challenges involving security, cost, risk, and governance. I’d like to address one particular challenge associated with those: how … Continue…

Refer to this post for openssl info, then follow the steps here:

1. Generate a certificate signing request
1. openssl req -out vcops.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout vcops.key
• Answer the wizard questions appropriately for your environment.
• This creates your Certificate request and generates…

This post originally appeared on bradhedlund.com, Brad is an experienced networking professional in VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit, specializing in network virtualization and data center fabrics. Data centers exist for the sole purpose to deploy applications. Applications that…

VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers automated log management through log analytics, aggregation and search, extending VMware’s leadership in analytics to log data. With an integrated cloud operations management approach, it provides the operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility…

VMturbo Operations Manager 4.0VMturbo announced today the availability of their multi-hypervisor management solution VMturbo Operations Manager 4.0.  Already last month, VMturbo brought changes to their free tool, which is based on the same “engine”. The free utility was renamed to Virtual…

VMware opened  a public beta program  of a soon to be released new product named vCenter Log Insight at June 11. The product was originally developed by Pattern Insight which sold their product Log Insight to VMware in August 2012. VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers automated log management…

The Orchestration and Automation layer of the Software Defined Data Center is where the benefits of the SDDC is translated are translated into working applications for end users and business constituents. Every Cloud Management Platform relies upon either a script or one of these automation…

Another year another VMworld. I have just received the email telling me my VMworld 2013 session was accepted. It is a crazy ride working for VMware. Session: PHC4750 – How to Build a Hybrid Cloud in Less than a Day Presenters: David Hill Abstract: In this session we will discuss how you can build…

For those like me who love reading research papers by developers you might want to head over to labs.vmware.com as today a new version of the VMware Technical Journal was released, the summer 2013 edition. You can download it as a PDF on the website, or you can read the individual articles straight…

This is something that was recently brought to my attention, and I wasn’t aware of this difference in behavior between the various storage vendors who implement VAAI-NAS. VAAI-NAS implements a number of different offload primitives, but the one we are Continue reading →

<img>VMware vCenter Log Insight is the new solution of VMware for log management and analytics. It delivers superior technology for automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search, and an easy to use user interface. Log Insight provides the operational intelligence…

We recently ran a survey that sampled customers who opened support requests with us, and one of the questions asked if you would be interested in a new troubleshooting wiki to supplement our other self-help resources. The results are in … Continue reading →

A recent upgrade to my work laptop (replacing the standard SATA 250GB drive with a super fast 256GB OCZ Vector SSD) prompted me to rebuild my OS with a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional x64. As you would expect, my work laptop is domain connected, so my main user profile is within the domain…

Today VMware announced its latest analytics product, VMware vCenter Log Insight. The product enables you to easily perform advanced analytics on log data aggregated across your physical, virtualized and cloud infrastructure, leading to across the board improvements in IT metrics. Log Insight is…

The vCenter Server Appliance (vSCA) is a great thing if you use it for a small environment. But there are some limitations you should know and take care of them. In this article you will find a short notice how to install the vSCA and a summary from the supported services and the limitations: How…

Today I am excited to announce our (Duncan and I) newest project. Over the next 7 days we will be gathering the best vSphere design considerations around and compiling it into a pocket-sized book. The current working title is “Tweet-sized vSphere design considerations”. As this book is created…

Hello World….

vCenter Log Insight (Release Notes) - The first public release of the new Log Management and Analytics product.

VMware vCenter Log Insight is the new solution of VMware for log management and analytics for dynamic hybrid cloud environments. It delivers superior technology for…

I just want to thank everyone for making the vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive book promotion a huge success. Thanks for sharing the news with your colleagues / friends / readers! Frank and I never expected that so many would be downloaded… As I said on facebook: vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS…

I just wrote an article for the vCloud blog which is titled “Top 3 Skills Your IT Team Needs to Prepare for the Cloud“. Although it is far less technical then I normally post here, it might still be worth a read for those who are considering a private or hybrid cloud, and even consuming … … …

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With the launch of VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service you now have three options available when discussing VMware public cloud options:

1. VMware vCloud Powered - Available through a lot of different partners throughout the world.
2. VMware vCloud Datacenter - Offered by a few big…

If you want to stay in our Florida Disney Villa for a 15% discount in 2013, you have come to the right place. This is a rather unusual post for my site, and nothing virtualization related. I am offering a 15% discount on the remaining days to stay at our Florida villa.  For anyone wanting to stay…

It’s time yet again for another  episode of vExperts Weekly Digest. This week, finds us hot on the heels of the 2013 vExpert nominations where over 577 vExperts were awarded status. Make sure you check out Jeramiah Dooley’s breakdown of this years group. Also this week finds the us with the…

VMware Horizon Mirage 4.2 includes a new web console for Help Desk personnel to fulfill user requests.

With contributions from our esteemed colleagues:  Tomas Fojta, Michael Haines, Ray Budavari, Scott Harrison, Francois Misiak, Adrian Roberts, Raghvender Arni, Les Major, Jesse Schachter, Jagan Raghu This month we have several trick and tips from everything from vCloud Director transfer … Continue…

By: Duncan Epping, Principal Architect VMware R&D A question that arises often during conversations about the adoption of cloud computing is what kind of skills are required for a successful adoption of a public, private or hybrid cloud deployment. First … Continue reading →

The next London VMUG will take place on July 4th 2013 and it looks like a great line up as usual. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing the session about some real world experiences with vCenter SSO. I also heard a rumour that there may be a few copies of a new vCloud book given [...]

Earlier this year I wrote an article about using Google's Authenticator application to provide 2-Factor Authentication for connecting to ESXi using either the ESXi Shell locally or remotely over SSH. I also documented the process for compiling and building your own custom ESXi VIB with…

by Geoffrey Murase, Solutions Marketing, End-User Computing This past week I had the opportunity to attend the International Avaya User Group (IAUG) conference in Orlando, Florida.  The name of the conference was aptly titled “Converge2013” and brought together almost 3,000 … Continue reading …

While delivering a vCloud engagement to one of our enterprise customers using the latest vCloud Director 5.1.2 and vCloud Networking & Security 5.1.2a, my VXLAN configuration where failing at the stage where its preparing the hosts. I followed the same steps I have used for other customers and in my…

VMware Certified Instructor, Joe Desmond, details the best practices in using Snapshot functionality including:  vSphere Snapshot Overview describes tool to support guest O/S administration vSphere Anatomy of Snapshot – describing the snapshot process vSphere Power Tools Come with Big Warning … …

Virtualization doesn't always have to be about administrators in khaki pants and polo shirts splicing up physical servers into many virtual servers behind data center walls. The technology can provide end-users with a bit of fun as well.

read more

Last week I had the privilege to attend the Carolina Users Summit and from what I hear, it is one of the larger VMUGs in the US. I was asked to give a presentation on a recent community project that I collaborated with Ben Thomas on called vOpenData. The presentation goes into some background on the…

In our effort to provide our viewers with up to the minute information on VMware related news and topics, we’re posting the following list of new KB Entries for this week, direct from VMware Support. My VMware VMware vSphere Operations Management and VMware vCloud Suite Licensing (2052829) Date…

For those that have experienced VMworld first hand, you know how great of an event it is (doesn’t seem fair to just call it a conference) and that VMware rolls out all the stops to keeps folks coming back year after year. Well this year is no exception, last week VMware announced (post HERE) that…

TweetIt’s now common knowledge the vSphere Web Client is the main and preferred client VMware want us to use. Apart the resistance of users to adopt new tools, there are also two clear situations where you still need the Windows Client: the configuration of an ESXi server not connected to vCenter,…

I’ve had a fair number of folks ask me specifically what the functional differences are between runtime and storage leases in vCloud Director 5.1. More specifically – how do the various timers work, especially for an active vApp that tends to change states frequently. In this post, I’ll go…

Martin Casado, chief architect of networking here at VMware, probably made the understatement of the year in his blog post ahead of Interop Las Vegas when he wrote, “It is a very exciting time to be in networking…” The fact … Continue reading →

Is more automation always a good thing? Or should engineering and automation strike a balance? Read the full post for my thoughts.

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

The…

vCloud Automation Center empowers IT to rapidly deploy, provision and manage cloud services across multi-vendor virtual, physical, and public cloud infrastructures.  vCloud Automation Center delivers a flexible framework that transforms existing infrastructure, tools and processes into a scalable…

featured-vsphere

After a complete shutdown of an ESXi environment, I had some issues with one ESXi host while attempting to start it. The SD card containing the ESXi image became corrupted, which forced me to replace the SD card and reinstall ESXi. After the installation and configuration of the host…

I recently read the book Project Phoenix by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. If you are in development, IT, and Security it should be #1 on your reading list. In this book the authors discuss all the horrors we hear about in IT with a clear direction on how to fix them. There is politics,…

VMware WSXVMware WSX 1.1 Beta release is available. For those of you who don’t know what’s WSX is. It’s basically a possibility to access VMs that runs under VMware Workstation, remotely by using just a web browser. This opens possibilities for tablets, and an access from different OS without…

After updating my View environment to version 5.2, I noticed that my PowerCLI scripts that I run on the View Connection Server keep failing. After looking into the issue I found that each script execution fails when trying to load the snap-in for View PowerCLI into PowerShell with the following…

The following content is in Spanish, the language in which the webinar is presented. El pasado 6 de junio 2013 en ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag LATAM @elnemesisdivina presentó el tema #VCAP DCA6.2 Troubleshoot CPU & Memory Performance

featured-nutanix

Last week Nutanix held their "Star Trek into Darkness product presentation tour" in Pathe cinema Amsterdam. It was one of the last locations in this world wide tour. Both the product presentation as well as the movie was a big success....in case you missed it: Star Trek into Darkness…

While writing technical blogs, it’s always nice to include commands and scripts that readers can try on their own. I find it a bit challenging to accurately document these in steps while intensively testing or debugging something by myself. There are actually commands that faithfully list all the…

It wasn’t till going over some docs and re-reading Horizon View Multi-VLAN Explained that it dawned on me that View Composer no longer overwrites a desktop’s network label on refresh and recompose. If the network label(port group) was set to automatic or even if you change the network label…

In today's world, enterprise data isn't in the enterprise. It's created with a camera, Google Docs, or Evernote. I mean think about Evernote from an employee's perspective. Every thought goes straight into Evernote, and the user picks and chooses what...(read more)<img><img>

Red Hat Summit is the premier open source technology event to showcase the latest and greatest in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management technologies. The Summit and JBoss World 2013 edition will be on June 11 – 14, 2013 at the Hynes Center in…

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Thanks to VMware and John Troyer specifically for allowing me to continue my journey along side my fellow VMware vExpert’s. There are old timers and newcomers, two timer’s to five timer’s, all talents and evangelist in their own right. At the end of the day, our goal is to push the…

Two thirds of the Geek Whisperers Podcast join is for a decidedly non-techie serving of vSoup.

For some reason John Troyer snubbed us, but hey, we can´t really complain since both Amy Lewis and Matthew Brender graced us with their presence.

Naturally we get into a social media, [...]

In this video you will see how to group Resources by GEO location and activate the dashboard widget. Depending on your environment, you might want to group some or all of your resources according to their physical location. When resources are grouped according to their physical location, you can see…

TrainSignal Offline PlayerTrainSignal has released EMC Storage Essentials, which is new training covering EMC’s VNX technology. TrainSignal with their latest offering allows to “consume” training courses, as a training-on-demand. It means that you no longer buy an individual courses, but…

Recently I was given the opportunity to test drive Nokia’s flagship phone – the Nokia Lumia 920 (Engadget Readers Choice 2012) and I thought I would share some highlights from the user experience.  My current phone is a HTC EVO 4G LTE which is quite similar in specs, but for many functions I…

Hosts John Mark Troyer, VMware @jtroyer Guests You – The Community! News Don’t miss VMworld 2013 (10th annual) Veeam announces Backup and Replication 7 for VMware WorldPay Deploys VMware Network Virtualization to Enable User Self-Provisioning And Support Around-the-Clock Application Development…

Once in a while either Microsoft or VMware starts a marketing campaign against the other competitor. We have seen many of those campaigns Microsoft last year run the VM limited campaign using a guy called Ted. The website vm-limited.com directs now to another campagne.  There was an action by…

I’ve been pretty quiet on the WSX front since the release of WSX 1.0. A lot of work has been put into taking this from a prototype to something more solid, more functional. Yesterday, we released a beta of WSX 1.1, which takes a big step in that direction, improving the reliability and access to…

Event 4 for the PowerShell Scripting Games 2013 has closed, here are a few learning points I picked up on from entries submitted. 1) Random AD Users The first part of this event is to work with 20 randomly selected users from Active Directory. Initial thoughts might be that this is pretty…

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I am very pleased to announce the release of my first course (of many I hope) with the always spectacular TrainSignal. As of today, EMC Storage Essentials is now available for consumption. That’s assuming you have an all you can eat subscription from TrainSignal. Which if you don’t, you…

These tips will help you build everything from a starter VMware home lab to a vTARDIS vSphere lab or one that can host vCloud Suite.

VMware has made some changes to the Horizon Suite licensing since our last post about VMware’s Horizon Suite licensing and promotions. The changes are included in the VMware End-User Computing Licensing, Pricing and Packaging Whitepaper, but are not well called out. Here’s what you need to know…

Yesterday I finally received my Pebble which I ordered a while back when they were in their Kickstarter phase of “Should we do this?” – I for one am glad they did as it’s a great device! For those of you who are not aware, a Pebble is a cool watch witch uses Bluetooth to [...]

Cool Tech:…

The End of Life (EOL) process has begun for vFabric Enterprise Ready Server (ERS).  The end of availability date is July 1, 2013, after which ERS will no longer be available for purchase. After this date, existing customers will be … Continue reading →

If you’ve started a VMware View design project, or are starting one soon, you’ll want to take advantage of an opportunity to get some great guidance at discounted savings. VMware View: Design Best Practices presents a methodology for designing a VMware … Continue reading →

I was fortunate to spend the last couple days at the Charlotte VMware User Summit.  For those of you not familar, the User Summits or Conferences are larger regional and all day conferences for the VMware Users Group.  I happen to be one of the leaders for the Washington DC group, and have been…

Categories: Cloud Computing, Cool Stuff!, News, Virtualization, VMware Tags: VMworld 2013 Well its official, the word is out. VMworld 2013 sessions have been announced and from the looks of it I will be attending both US and Barcelona again this year (hopefully I won’t fall a sleep everywhere in…

I am very excited to announce that I had a session accepted for presentation at both VMworld US and EMEA this year!  I will be presenting with my good friend Thomas Corfmat (@tcorfmat), Senior Product Manager at VMware.  This session will take you through the steps for deploying/configuring vCO,…

A few days ago I blogged about my new idea in this post: “The Doctor is: IN” and I received a lot of positive comments and even my first request for assistance. So… here we go !!! Tonight ( June 7th ) at 19:00 CEST the first session will go live. That is, if Google [...]

See full post at: The…

This is the week that session accept and decline emails were sent out for the VMworld session catalog. I’m very excited to share that panel session VSVC4570 entitled “Ask the Expert VCDXs” was accepted! Here’s the overview of the session: “One of the highest rated sessions at VMworld is…

This post describes how I use Hazel, an OS X utility, to help automate some file management tasks.

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

Reducing the Friction: Automating…

Over the last few years there has been an increase in the number of database as a service (DBaaS) offerings that have entered the market place. IaaS providers like Amazon have released solutions such as RDS that automates database administration tasks in the area of scaling, replication, failover,…

Source : Vaugh Stewart (NetApp) Blog  

This is a guest post by vExpert Jane Rimmer <As technology users, implementors, evangelists, etc. we are bombarded with brands from vendors in our sector and, as consumers, we are continuously targeted by brands tempting us to buy their products. But have you ever considered yourself as a brand?…

Yesterday the VMworld team send out e-mails to everyone whose session got chosen. As always there are people who submit a session and hear the news that sadly their session didn’t make it. Did you submit a session, got rejected but still want to share it? Run a #vBrownBag session! The…

I just received the news that I have sessions accepted for both VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona. Session ID: BCO4872 Speakers: Lee Dilworth, Duncan Epping Session Title: Operating and Architecting a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster based infrastructure Track: Business Continuity Presenting…

VMware has announced a new version of Horizon Mirage which should be launched shortly. The new version offers great new features. A main optimization is the improvement for the Endpoint centralization. VMware has modified Mirage so that the total number of IOPS required is reduced. This will lead…

Updates for vSphere Data Protection and vSphere Data Protection Advanced were released today. These updates fix a number of issues that exist in previous versions. For a complete list of resolved issues, please see the release notes: vSphere Data Protection 5.1.11 … Continue reading →

VMware has made some changes to the Horizon Suite licensing since our last post about VMware’s Horizon Suite licensing and promotions. The changes are included in the VMware End-User Computing Licensing, Pricing and Packaging Whitepaper, but are not well called out.…

IBM Edge is the IBM’s premier Storage and Optimized IT Solutions event. The IBM Edge 2013 edition will be held June 10-14, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada (at Mandalay Bay Resort) and will will bring together over 3500 IT professionals from all industries to sharpen expertise, discover new innovations,…

Author: Michael Francis  A business model describes the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value.1 When I consider the way on-demand services has changed business models, I think of the traditional retail model, which was a bricks-and-mortar … Continue reading →

8246400079_1e22e1f5c5_z.jpgP1100287sm.jpgAs is my semi-annual tradition, I want to let you know who the bloggers are that we'll be hosting at HP Discover.  Most of these guys have day jobs and take time off of work to join us at our event. I like to promote them so that you'll visit their blogs and…

Recently, I was asked to investigate a vCenter Server 5.0 having issues with its database. As a result, the “VMware Virtual Center Server” service stopped and vSphere Clients were losing connectivity. The vCenter Server was running on a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition. Although not…

If a server isn't on the hallowed VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide, that doesn't mean it won't support ESXi. But it's a tough road to verification.

by Hanan Stein, Product Management, End-User Computing Today, VMware is pleased to announce the launch of the latest edition of VMware® Horizon Mirage™: the Horizon Mirage 4.2 release. In Horizon Mirage 4.2 VMware has made major storage performance improvements which greatly reduces the time…

      If you are in the Minneapolis area make sure you attend the Minneapolis VMUG User Conference. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, Jun 11th 2013 at the Minneapolis Airport Marriott. I am honored to present the keynote of the day with a session entitled “End-User Computing Vision for the…

    On this episode of the NetApp Communities Podcast, I bring back an old interview from 2011 to remind everyone how awesome the VMworld Hands-On-Labs are, and always have been, and give you an inside-scoop interview with one of it’s creators, Irish Spring, who gives an amazing detailed recount…