While automating with PowerCLI scripts, you have most probably stumbled upon a situation when you need to access the parent of an object – the virtual machine of a CD drive, the host of virtual machine, the cluster of a...

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the United States General Services Administration has approved the acquisition of some cloud services for use by the Federal Government including many of the Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Since these services are for sale as well…

While installing VMware vCenter Server I get the following error: After extending my basic disk, with Dell’s ExtPart.exe utility, to 16GB I still get the same error message. Validation on the MSI installer package shows that the installer package becomes corrupted. After downloading a new one…

Beginning with Citrix Provisioning Services 5.1, Citrix introduced a feature that required an end user to enter credentials to fully boot a target device.  My assumption is that this would be primarily for Physical Workstations booting images via PVS in a XenDesktop scenario.  (i.e. Localized…

Transaction log for VIM_VCDB is full. A week or two after an upgrade of vCenter to the 4.1 version I ended up with a vCenter server service down. I could not connect with my VI client any more, so I RDP to my vCenter server and I saw the vCenter server service was down. I [...]

A really great EMC partner, Nexus IS, has built a really cool VDI centric lab where customers can really see and learn. As a partner of many technology leaders – you’ll get a chance to see this across many vendors,...

Customer feedback on these keep getting better and better, so we need to continue to dial it up! August is dominated by vSpecialists, including our very own Scott Baker, the inimitable Scott Lowe, and Tee Glasgow. Brian Henderson is too...

I recently saw an interesting question on the VMTN developers forum asking about vSphere SDK for Perl and VUM API integrations. As it stands today, VMware has not publicly exposed or documented the VMware Update Manager APIs, though they have released a few PowerCLI VUM cmdlets for PowerCLI users.…

And VMex adds to it, with a solution that can deliver a complete infrastructure solution in simple fashion.

I missed out on the vSphere 4.1 launch as I was out on vacation. So here's a belated post announcing the "What's new in vSphere 4.1 - vCenter Server" whitepaper. The paper provides an overview of new virtualization management capabilities in the vCenter Server 4.1, including enhancements in VMware…

UPDATE July 18th, 2010: a bit more info on Site Recovery Manager & Avamar… Whenever there is a major VMware release, a common question from EMCers, EMC customers, and EMC partners is: “what is supported day one, and what will...

The program for VMworld Developer Days just got posted, and I’m very excited to be giving a talk about the VIX API and Guest Operations. In addition to a technical deep dive on the VIX API implementation of guest operations...

Last week NetApp released version 2.0 of it's Virtual Storage Console plug-in for vCenter. You can download VSC 2.0 from now.netapp.com. To install VSC 2.0, you have to uninstall version 1.0. What I don't like about this method is that vCenter can't find the plug-in named Virtual Storage Console…

I was working on a specialized project that included the use of vmrun (part of VMware VIX). The Project This project required the ability to restore a VM to a baseline Snapshot. The challenge is that the user is not a tech person, and the requirement was that it was very easy to restore the [...]

Vendor lock-in is a big concern in the server virtualization market, especially as more vendors come out with converged infrastructure and virtualization-ready appliances. Vendor lock-in is also a big concern when you’re talking about Oracle, especially now that it owns Sun and has plans to build…

Users still on VMware's ESX hypervisor prepare to make the switch to ESXi, but not without trepidation. VSphere 4.1 is the last VMware release to support the ESX Linux-based management console.

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We were just talking about some random VMware acronyms during a lab day and I thought I would write the ones down which some of us didn’t know. (Even google did not have the answer to some) I guess the most difficult one to figure out was VPXA/VPXD, which refers to VPX which was the [...]

Hello all, This updated release of SRM is now available and you can find the release notes here. This is a maintenance release which means it has fixes and no new features. I want to draw your attention to one fix in that if you are using vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDS) and are also using SRM…

In February Convirture unveiled the 2.0 version of its open source virtualization management tool designed specifically for the open source Xen and KVM virtualization platforms. The company also said at that time it had plans to deliver an Enterprise version of the management software.

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NetApp is providing a discount for the purchase of a full conference pass for individuals attending either VMworld in San Francisco or VMworld in Copenhagen. The NetApp discount reduces the price from $1745 to $1495 (USD) and € 1150 to...

I was asked by a fellow twitter user to give my thoughts on best practices for virtual machine (VM) backups. I didn't know anything about this persons company or product, so these are just reflections of my own opinion.

I would expect my ideal backup solution to take a snapshot using the vSphere…

VMworld 2010 San Francisco is set to start in just four weeks (August 30th – September 2nd).  This year’s VMworld is already shaping up to be a killer event.  Compared to last year’s VMworld, I personally am seeing a 500+% increase in the number of clients of mine who are signed up to…

Welcome to the latest edition of the Virtualization Vendor Profile. Every once in a while I’ll talk with a smaller or lesser-known company, learn about their business, discuss some industry trends, and write up a recap. The issue of mixed virtual environments — running multiple platforms…

We’ ve been doing quite a few VMware View POC’s and the question that colleagues keep asking me is: ‘How do I optimize my Windows guest OS for use with VMware View?’. First of all, I primarily use x86 versions of Windows XP and 7. The disk usage is much less, I seldom need more than [...]

This weeks chinwaggee is Daniel Eason – I know Dan from attending the User Group in London. Plus I follow his blog and tweets. He’s  currently an IT Infrastructure Architect from the UK working for airline. His main specialisms are within the key areas of a Datacentre Infrastructure, and this…

With the release of vSphere 4.1 there have been some great enhancements that have been added with this release. In one of my earlier post I took a look at the vSphere 4.1 release of ESXi. This post I am going to take a look at vSphere 4.1 availability options and enhancements. So what has changed…

To whom it  may concern, here is a friendly reminder that RecoverPoint 3.3 SP1 has been released. Here is a sampling of what it encompasses, release notes here.. Carry on…

RecoverPoint/SE for Unisphere 1.0 management console support

The RecoverPoint/SE for Unisphere 1.0 management console…

New Free tool from Paragon Software. With this free tool you’ll be able to convert your PC running under Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 into a virtual machine. Either 32 or 64bits version of the software are available for download. Four types of virtual machines are supported: - VMware Workstation…

This is not a secret anymore for a long time now and there are many sites out there that will show you how to install VMware ESXi3.5 and ESXi4.0 on a USB key. My favorite article about this topic remains Duncan Epping’s article at yellow-bricks.com Now with ESXi4.1 there is a minor change, the…

In 2010, all VMworld Labs will be powered by the VMware cloud and presented via a self-service Lab Cloud portal, allowing VMware to increase the number of Labs offered and give you more opportunities to explore how virtualization can make a powerful impact on your organization. Unlike traditional…

In some circumstances where firewalls devices are are blocking VMware View traffic, or other network service is already making use of VMware View default network ports you may be required to change the ports in use. Another reason for a View port change would be when a organisation have a standard…

Check out the latest update to ghettoVCB which now support backup logs to be emailed upon competition. This feature is in experimental support and require the availability of nc (netcat) utility which is included in ESX(i) 4.0+. One can utilize netcat for variety of networking tasks, including…

One of the best parts of attending VMworld is the wealth of information shared in breakout sessions, hands-on labs, and in vendor booths. This year NetApp is making our vExperts and subject matter experts available for one-on-one meetings and/or demos...

Today the Imagine Virtually Anything Alliance (IVA) of Cisco, NetApp, and VMware announced the industry’s first certified end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solution for VMware cloud deployments and virtual infrastructures. This certification is a significant milestone in the…

VMware TechExchange will take place in San Francisco in the same location of VMworld 2010 from August 30 to September 1st. If you want to learn VMware technologies especially APIs/SDKs including Spring framework, Zimbra, and etc., you should join us. I will present best practices on using VMware…

Some goodies for our dev day event.

Reasons why developers should consider attend our upcoming Developer Day Event @VMworld 2010 http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/techexchange

Getting the Active Directory Group SID can be tedious, unless you know how to script for it. Then it's simple!

I wrote an article recently about VMware U2. And I made this god awful pun associated with U2… Update 2 and the rockband U2. Geddit? Sadly, that reference didn’t really make the article on TechTarget. I dunno, perhaps Bono rang them up and said they couldn’t use it. The article was written…

After sharing that I picked up an Apple iPad a number of readers asked how they could connect to a NetApp array via SMB (or formerly known as CIFS). In June some at NetApp engaged with the developers at Stratospherix...

John Troyer published a document on the VMworld site

VMworld 2010 is going to be a whirlwind of technological and social activity. Let's keep in touch! If you are going to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco and use social media - like blogs or Twitter -- please add yourself to the list below. We're…

I have a small update to VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools For Advanced Tasks.

Copy/Pasta from original post: FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space,…

After importing the new vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 4.1 on my VMware Workstation 7 environment I noticed that it boots with a memory crash error, an “unable to access resume device” message and eventually ends with a kernel panic. The memory crash error seems like something that can…

This is the final article in a series about the new vSphere4.1 release. To be honest as I begin to the use the software on a daily basis I’m beginning to count a significant number of tiny enhancements here and there, that went totted up together really make difference. So I’m thinking at some…

This new book with essential information on how to protect data in will be released on August 2, 2010

Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers will be released on August 2, 2010 Virtualization is changing the data center architecture and as a result, data protection is is quickly evolving as well.…

With the recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 and VMware vCenter 4.1 we wanted to clarify support for these platforms with the current shipping versions of VMware View. As hardware vendors continue to improve processor hardware, VMware is taking steps...

On an internal mailing list we had a very useful discussion around storage migrations when a SAN is replaced or a migration needs to take place to a different set of disks. Many customers face this at some point. The question usually is what is the best approach? SAN Replication or Storage…

If you've been procrastinating in getting yourself registered for VMworld this summer in San Francisco here is your friendly reminder. This year's VMworld 2010 is being held in San Francisco August 30 through September 2. At the conference you can...

Whilst I have been away on vacation, something fairly interesting has happened in the area of Open Source initiatives for Infrastructure as a Service in the form of a new initiative from NASA and Rackspace called OpenStack. You may remember in our last post in this area, we noted that there was a…

If you are attending VMworld Developers Day 2010, come by and check out the presentation I will be giving alongside the security and virtualization expert, Edward Haletky.

Our presentation is entitled: vGhetto - Communities Building Great Solutions (PPC-07)

Level: Advanced

Description: The…

The good folks at the OpenNebula team notified me that they have released the first beta version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0 which should be... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

image

You kick off the clone, apply the customization file (leveraging vCenter’s excellent SysPrep integration), wait a couple of minutes and pop into the console expecting to begin application installations and find this :

“Window could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass…

I’m back in the VMware dimension. Today i got back on track to resume my pursuit for the VCDX status. I already passed the Enterprise Exam. I was reading up on the track to become VCDX and noticed that VCDX 4 is in the running. I guess it would be a good idea to abandon [...]

Changing the number of vCPUs back to 1. A post by Jason Boche explaining the benefits in terms of cost for running individual applications in your vSphere 4.1 virtual infrastructure.  By using multiple cores of an individual socket (if the application is licensed per socket) you’re able to gain…

When you deploy your UCS environment once of the first things you will want to do is integrate it into your monitoring system. One way is through integrating with syslog. Here are some notes and tips.

Hi guys, just a quick post to remind you that the next vBeers will be help this Thursday, August 5th. The last vBeers was great fun, I met a lot of new people so I'm hoping there will be more new faces again this time. This time I must remember to eat something!! When & Where The [...]

Related…

Since a few days I’m not able to click any links in outlook anymore. Damn crap. This is the solution If you received this error after uninstalling any application that takes over the HTML open command (including, but not limited to, Chrome & Firefox browsers) you may also need to change the…

Aside from running lots of features into the enterprise-class virtualization suite, a number of requirement changes are being rolled in.

View the VMworld 2010 San Francisco Content Catalog, or the Copenhagen Content Catalog to learn more about the sessions, labs and speakers that make VMworld the “must-attend” event of the year.

With the broadest variety of breakout sessions ever offered, you can dive deep into the heart of…

I’m very happy with being awarded as the Independent VCI of Q2 2010. :-)

Kevin Johnson – VMware’s Northern Region Education Manager:

Eric has been very busy over the last 3 months and has delivered 14 classes over a wide range of subjects; two of these classes were LoL. Eric’s score were also…

(Updated: July 29, 2010 with the complete session list and abstracts) The Technology Exchange for Developers (aka Developer Day) conference taking place at VMworld in San Francisco, CA is focused exclusively on the needs of developers. The sessions will focus on areas of interest to all developers…

Today Yesterday, I embarked on an upgrade from vSphere 4.0 U2 to vSphere 4.1. There’s a couple of caveats here and some gotchas. Firstly, I backed up my vCenter DB, and also shutdown my SQL2K8 and vCenter VMs, and took a snapshot of them before beginning. In terms of the order – you MUST started…

VIRTUMANIA Episode 20 was far from scripted, but some of the best known names in virtualization scripting join us for this show. The following is the podcast summary: VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 20 – Powershell is Latin to Me. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of…

Video from KBTV. New video from KBTV is about upgrading the vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 by using a script. vCenter 4.1 is not supported on 32 bits systems any more.  In case you do have your existing vCenter on 32 bit system, you have to reinstall, or choose another server and install the server with [...]

Is Citrix king of deploying applications and workspaces to desktops? Citrix's portfolio of solutions is extensive - but extensive is difficult to introduce change to. Are there serious challengers and if so, is changing to those vendors an easy task? Related posts:

1. News: Citrix Releases Revised…

VMware HealthAnalyzer automates the collection of VMware Infrastructure or VMware vSphere™ inventory, configuration and utilization data, analyzes data and recommends grades, and generates a report card that presents observations, findings and data categorized by VMware Health Check best…

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-misses-deadline-in-high-profile-la-deal-2010-07-23?dist=countdown

Note to Google and CSC, both companies I enjoy a working relationship with:

The Cloud is an accounting puzzle, not a technology one. Add up the costs of of hardware, software, bandwidth, secure…

In vSphere 4.1, several properties and types have been deprecated. The following table from vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 release note lists each deprecated API element and its replacement. Name of deprecated type, method, or property As of vSphere API 4.1, use instead… Methods…

Sure, VMworld is about learning. It’s also about networking with people – friends, colleagues, customers, and even respected competitors. Heck – I’m in full on cram mode now. We are prepping content, kit to support the hands-on-labs, finalizing face-melting demos,...

Cisco have released an emulator for the Unified Computing System (UCS). If you are working with UCS you can now run UCSM from your desktop without needing hardware, making training, testing and documentation much easier.

Last week, I attended the New England VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, and sat in on a presentation in the afternoon from a new company called Actifio, which recently raised an $8 million Series A funding round and will begin shipping products in August. The company’s focus and heritage is in…

BlueLock and VMware have announced the finalists for the vCloud Express Cloud Monkey contest. The four finalists, selected by online voters along with BlueLock and VMware, each receive a FlipCam and are now eligible to compete for the Grand Prize – an engraved iPad! The Cloud Monkey finalists will…

This news roundup outlines the debate concerning VMware's new licensing-and-pricing model. There is also news of VMware's second quarter earnings and VMware's affect in India.

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VMware patches have historically wrought havoc and broken functionality in virtual environments. The latest debacle with the vSphere 4 Update 2 hasn't helped the company's rep, either.

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Our first video covering vSphere 4.1 is now live. The video compliments KB article 1022137 vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations. and describes the process for using our Data Migration tool to upgrade VMware vCenter Server 4.1 VMware vCenter...

Just got noted that the Presentation of the VCDX 3 Preperation Workshop has been published. This Powerpoint presentation was given by John Arrasjid and Pang Chen during Partner Exchange and got a lot of great feedback. For everyone aiming to become a VCDX over the course of the upcoming months this…

VMware recently released a whitepaper showing the performance scalability of SharePoint Server 2007 on VMware vSphere 4.1. This paper demonstrates that vSphere 4.1 exhibits high performance and includes advanced features that can improve the overall user experience in multi-tier applications...

As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!“, Alan and myself started writing a PowerCLI book. At about the same time Alan got the once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist. Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free! Alan has been spending a fair amount of time in…

In my new Train Signal vSphere Pro Vol 2 video, I cover using Veeam Backup in -depth. While I spent over 45 minutes just on backing up VMs with Veeam Backup in that series, I wanted to show VMware Admins out there that Veeam Backup isn’t complicated. While it is powerful and has lots of [...]

Steve Jin, VMware R&D This entry was reposted from DoubleCloud.org, a blog for architects and developers on virtualization and cloud computing. In my last blog, I discussed how to optimize workloads across the cloud. This is based on the assumption that you already have an existing infrastructure.…

Greeting everyone. Been very busy preparing for a technical conference my company is putting on, but I thought I’d post on one of the issue’s I’ve come across in the lab. When upgrading a vCenter 4 server to vCenter 4.1, you aren’t given the option of selecting the LocalSystem account…

"Viruses, malware, and trojans" -- if this were the $25,000 Pyramid game show (I could be showing my age here), a contestant might reply with something like, "These are bad things that can infect a PC while surfing the Internet." And they'd be right.

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I got the idea from watching the marijuana dispensaries start to pop up across the country and given my line of work in the data center business I had an 'A-Ha' moment.

Grow pot in old data centers

There is adequate power
Raised floors could support water lines for irrigation
The temp and humidity are…

Citrix has released a new whitepaper detailing some best practices when upgrading the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA).  Nothing too earth shattering in this paper though.  Take good backups, Test, Test, Test and don’t try to upgrade the agents through RDP, ICA or actual XenDesktop Sessions. Smile…

Virtualization Security, Configuration Management, Service and Capacity Management, Provisioning and Lifecycle Management, and Backup/Recovery are essential functions that must be added to a virtualization platform when virtualizing business critical applications. VMware vSphere is clearly the…

VMware Consolidated Backup Order of tasks in a VMware Consolidated Backup snapshot operation (1008163) Date Published: 7/21/2010 vcbMounter fails with the error: Cannot create directory (1009564) Date Published: 7/21/2010 VMware ESX Opening virtual machine console fails with the error: The...

VKERNEL released Chargeback 2.0 What is Chargeback? Chargeback in this new release support to both Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and VMware ESX environments. With Chargeback you’re able the real costs of your applications running. You’re able to mesure the actual or allocated resource usage…

I was asked recently a question about the implications of the Block Size and the File Size when formatting a VMFS datastore and my answer was partially wrong. So I decided to deep dive into this matter over the week-end and came up with an article and a video which I hope will clarify the link…

It's an idea that I had for a quite long time, and yet I managed to get it out in the busiest time of my life. Love it or hate it – it's just for fun, guys!   THE VM CROWD      Episode 1: I'm On Twitter                                                   …

With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1 it has become even more apparent that the next vSphere release will only have an ESXi version. This isn’t world shocking news since VMware had announce this...

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When running a virtualized instance of ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 1 from within VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation you may notice the following error message on the front ESX/ESXi screen: “NUMA: 706: Can’t boot system as genuine NUMA. Booting with 1 fake node(s)” I started experiencing this message…

SPEC has diligently working on an industry standard version of VMmark since something like 2006. The first version of their product is complete and was released during my recent holiday. I have been talking with colleagues and customers about SPECvirt for years and would like to talk about what…

In my last blog, I discussed how to optimize workloads across the cloud. This is based on the assumption that you already have an existing infrastructure. What if you don’t have an existing cloud infrastructure but would like to design one from scratch? Here is what you should be thinking about to…

RSA and VMware both have legions of crazed fanatical customers, and as it happens both companies are owned by EMC. This was the topic of one of the side conversations I had at BriForum last month. We talked about how it's weird that the two companies...(read more)<img><img>

Migrating more servers today to the virtual world. Old servers stacked on pallets = good. # Powered by Twitter Tools Related Posts: Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates

Migrating more servers today to the virtual world. Old servers stacked on pallets = good. # Powered by Twitter Tools Related Posts: Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates

This week’s APAC Virtualization Roundtable features Duncan Cambridge, Senior Enterprise Management Solutions Specialist at VMware, and Darren Byrnes, director at Synergistex. Together, the team will cover three products of the recently announced VMware vCenter Product Family and Enterprise…

This year looks to be another swell get-together in Vegas.  I had to miss last year (first time in…forever) so I’m looking forward to 112 degrees, recirculated air, and stumble-drunk hax0rs jackpotting ATMs and commandeering elevators. I’ll be getting in on the 27th. I have a keynote at the…

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has introduced Multicore Virtual CPU technology to its bare metal flagship hypervisor.  This is an interesting feature which had already existed in current versions of VMware Workstation.  VMware has consistently baked in new features in its Type 2…

A few weeks ago I saw some RT’s/@’s on Twitter referencing John Flowers and that name brought back some memories. Today I sent a tweet to John asking him if I remembered correctly that he was at SANS in New Orleans in 1999 when he was still at Hiverworld. He responded back confirming he was,…

One of the new features that came with vSphere 4.1 was the ability to use Active Directory Authentication on ESX(i) servers for permissions, console access and ssh access.This is a great feature that you will probably want to activate on all your ESX(i) servers. Unfortunately this new feature is not…

Basic partition operations with Acronis Disk Director Home 11. Here is my little how-to video showing some really basic partition operations with Acronis Disk Director Home 11. This edition of Acronis just went out few weeks ago and its fully compatible with Windows 7. I did already a review of…

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During a recent trip, I decided to use GoGo Inflight Internet aboard a Delta Airlines flight.  I’ve only used the service once before and that is merely because the service typically isn’t offered on the flights I am on.  Both the reliability and latency of service far exceeded my…

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post, but I couldn’t keep this to myself: From the VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 for vCenter Server 4.1 Release Notes: What’s New The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new…

As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!”, Luc and myself started writing a PowerCLI book. At about the same time I got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist, how could I turn that down ! Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free, I have been spending a…

The new feature of ESXi 4.1 -  Active Directory integration, and also boot from SAN and scriptable installations now making the ESXi THE HYPERVIZOR as a choice for deployments. Vmware warned that vSphere 4.1 is the latest version with ESX classic (with the service console). With other improvements…

The expiration of the Bush tax cuts targets the producers most instrumental to our economic success. Many o fthem are small business owners and, particularly in a credit challenged economy, need their profits in order to facilitate growt. Taxing away earnings leaves the owners with both less…

So – do these ideas work together? Do they complement each other or compete? What’s the source of these questions Chad – and why are you asking them? :-) (BTW – this topic is one I’m covering at VMworld, along...

Beth Pariseau from SearchServerVirtualization.com has a new piece up about the change in VMware licensing for some products, from per-socket to per-VM. First off, and slightly off-topic, I’m quoted in the article, and it’s always interesting to see what reporters choose for quotes from me. This…

RES Software announced the release of the RES PowerFuse 2010 Basic Exam (RPFBX-300). The exam will be available worldwide to RES Software channel partners and customers beginning on August 1, 2010 as part of the RES Software Certification Program. Successful completion of RPFBX-300 is a necessary…

While doing some testing on ghettoVCB earlier this week, I noticed a new command line argument to vmkfstools utility called "--fix" in vSphere 4.1. From the man pages for vmkfstool, it states the following:


-x, --fix -[check|repair]
This option will check and/or repair the virtual disk in case of an…

There are certain events in life that we all strive to avoid, yet they seem practically inevitable. Facing problems, when using some software product is one of those. And using PowerCLI and vSphere makes no exception. Occasionally, you will stumble...

The Virtualization Security Podcast on 7/22 was all about the news of the week with our panelists discussing how this news affects everyone and anyone with respect to Virtualization Security. The news discussed: * NIST Released their Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies…

vCenter Converter now with Hyper-V import possibility. One of the caveats the vSphere 4.0 was the vCenter Converter Client. The one bundled with vCenter 4.0. Did not do the P2V with as a destination having thin provisioned disks. In that time, you had actually two choices. First: Do the conversion,…

The Business Impact of Virtualization on Software Licensing Contributed Article by Jeff Greenwald, Sr. Director of Product Management at Flexera... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Complex scripts need to handle errors and resolve common error scenarios without user interaction. A step in that direction is exposing the entire specter of vCenter server error hierarchy along with PowerCLI specific exceptions (for example when validating input parameters)....

VM customization is a very powerful feature that can make miracles during the deployment process. Since vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 U1, you can use cmdlets to modify a number of network settings of the newly created virtual machines. Here is how...

Whenever you need to install a new box with ESX, there’s the struggle with matching physical ports to VMware devices. Which network adapter becomes vmnic0?, Which hostbus adapter becomes vmhba1?, etc. Especially when you have a lot of network adapters this can be confusing and you can’t connect…

This 3 day course explores a design methodology, criteria, and approach for designing a VMware vSphere 4 virtual datacenter architecture consisting of VMware ESX/ESXi 4 and VMware vCenter Server 4. This course, by discussing the benefits and risks of available design alternatives, provides…

Are you stuck trying to figure out how to convince management into sending you to VMworld?  A justification template has been made available on the VMworld website.  Download.  Fill in the blanks.  Submit to management. Direct link to the letter (MS Word format) Post from: boche.net - VMware…

I was contacted awhile back ago by Alain Spineux, about his MKBackup utility and he was in the very early stages of integrating the software with my ghettoVCB script. Per Alain's website:

MKBackup is a free front-end for common backup tools like MS Windows ntbackup, and it successor wbadmin, Un*x…

Finally USB pass-through is possible on ESX hosts with the new vSphere 4.1 release! This feature ha been available in VMware Workstation/Fusion and Player for quite a while. The freshly added feature in vSphere 4.1 even works if you vMotion the guest from one host to another, which is in itself…

During the recent EMC London VMware Users Group (VMUG) PowerCLI aficionado Alan Renouf and I presented a (that ended up over running as we kind of had too much to say) session on ‘Why EMC for VMware’.  This was basically outlining many of the cool VMware related features and products that we…

Way back at VMworld 2008 NetApp announced our 50% storage savings guarantee for virtual data centers. This guarantee basically stated that running VMware on NetApp would reduce one’s storage requirements by half and if we did not, the remaining storage...

Configuring Active Directory-integrated security for ESXi hosts is easy; managing the license, a bit more complicated.

“This week’s “Vendorwag” is with the folks at Double-Take Software. Specifically, with Ian Masters of DoubleTake. Ian is UK Sales and Marketing Director at Double-Take Software, and has been advising organisations on their requirements for business continuity, disaster recovery and backup…

Steve Jin, VMware R&D This entry was reposted from DoubleCloud.org, a blog for architects and developers on virtualization and cloud computing. Cloud computing hasn’t changed the nature of computing – it just changed provisioning and management. That’s important to remember because workloads…

A week ago I already touched on this topic but I wanted to get a better understand for myself what could go wrong in these situations and how vSphere 4.1 solves this issue. Pre-vSphere 4.1 an issue could arise when shares had been set custom on a virtual machine. When HA fails over a virtual [...]

A year ago when I joined Cisco’s Unified Computing team, HP had just released a web page full of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the just-launched UCS. Quick note: I’m currently (should be) on holiday!  I drive down to Nurburgring tomorrow so I don’t have time to take the HP FUD apart piece…

HP makes great servers and recently passed IBM as the world leader in server sales. But unlike the UCS which is on its way to becoming a major player in the vDC space, the Matrix' tepid reception does not bode well. In order to avoid a fate as the "New Coke" of the virtualization era, future…

There has been quite a bit of interesting chatter and a whole lot of speculation within the VMware community lately about the future and viability of its free VMware Server product. VMware does seem focused on the vSphere product and how it ultimately relates to cloud computing, but have they turned…

Post by Adriano Costanzo

At some point we've all had to send a screenshot to someone with a tone of "Hey, look at this" or "Look for this" but didn't want to go through the multistep process of taking a screenshot, saving it, browsing to the file location, uploading, copying the URL etc. Gyazo…

Recently at the London VMware User Group I gave an additional presentation on top of the normal PowerCLI session I normally provide (which was interactive this time and I think worked very well). The subject of this session was “Why EMC for VMware”, I have had a number of questions from people…

Getting the ISO files used to install operating systems or the existing VMs you may have onto an ESX / vSphere host can be baffling to new VMware Admins who don’t have the right tool. The “right tool” is a SCP (secure copy protocol) file transfer application. There are a number of free options…

This morning NetApp released our unified vCenter plug-in for VMware vSphere the Virtual Storage Console 2.0 (aka the VSC2). Customers running NetApp FAS or 3-party storage arrays virtualized with vSeries can download the VSC via NOW. (click to view at...

I received multiple questions around this so decided to ask around internally. I managed to get ahold of the VMware Update Manager (aka VUM) Product Manager and after exchanging a couple of emails this is the outcome: VMware vSphere Compatibility Matrixes Table 13 on page 14 of the above linked…

Another new feature of vSphere 4.1 is the DRS-Fault Tolerance integration. vSphere 4.1 allows DRS not only to perform initial placement of the Fault Tolerance (FT) virtual machines, but also migrate the primary and secondary virtual machine during DRS load balancing operations. In vSphere 4.0 DRS is…

Revenue from VMware's low-end vSphere Essentials bundle increased 100% in the past quarter, but the company's SMB market share remains unclear.

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If you run your vCenter on SQL Server Express 2005, you are missing the ability to set up scheduled backup jobs with SQL Maintenance Plans, a feature available in the full version of SQL Server. This might not be a problem if your backup software has SQL Server agents that you use to backup your…

When you hear the term “host” when talking about virtual environment, what is the first thing you think of? For me, the answer is simple, a host is an appliance. For years now I have been standing on my soap box and preaching the power and fundamentals of automation in building and configuring…

Trilead VM Explorer Beta There is a new beta release of very popular backup client and explorer – VMX Explorer – at Trilead.com. You can browse the files located on your Virtual infrastructure running ESX Servers through the client. With this upcoming release there is new support for incremental…

There has been talks in VMware Communities and in some blog comments that vCenter Update Manager 4.1 has dropped support for SQL Server 2008 Standard so you would need SQL Server Enterprise edition instead. If you take a look at VMware vCenter Update Manager page on vSphere Compatibility Matrix…

Yes, I'm still alive. It's been over three months now without blogging, and yes it's crazy! Apart from being a Sr.Consultant and a TAM at VMware with 100% utilization in this huge and active region, I've been also doing lots of reading and studying lately to prepare for the VCAP exams. Not to…

“Help me manage users and then the devices will take care of themselves.” This is a quote from VMware's COO Tod Nielsen during the Q&A portion of the company's 2Q 2010 earnings call. (Thanks to Alessandro @virtualization.info for...(read more)<img><img>

Cloud computing hasn’t changed the nature of computing – it just changed provisioning and management. That’s important to remember because workloads in the cloud are very much similar to what we see in traditional computing infrastructures. To get the most out of your investment in cloud…

vSphere 4.1 introduces DRS VM-Host Affinity rules and offer two types of rules, mandatory (must run on /must not run on) and preferential (should run on /should nor run on). When creating mandatory rules, all ESX hosts not contained in the specified ESX Host DRS Group are marked as…

Last week I took my first vacation in a year and a half.  I had not missed a single day of work in 18 months.  So last week, when I was galavanting through Spain and running terrified, screaming, and covered in sangria through the streets of Pamplona, VMware made its biggest announcement in over a…

Using the VMware View Open Client on Mac OS X, but want to customize the behavior of the RDP connection it generates? Here's one way to customize the RDP parameters.

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

Check out the latest update to both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCBg2, which now supports vSphere 4.1! There are no new features introduced with these updates but ghettoVCB does include additional logging and debugging functionality to help identify issues that may arise. Unfortunately, with ghettoVCBg2 I…

When installing vCenter 4.1 on Windows 2008 R2 64-bit one of my colleagues ran into the following error message: This product can only be installed on the following 64-bit operating systems: Windows XP SP2 or above Windows 2003 Windows 2008 Although this message is actually correct it was not what…

We have published a whitepaper about how ESX server 4.1 manages the host memory resource. This paper not only presents the basic memory resource management concepts but also shows experiment results explaining the performance impact for four different memory reclamation...

VMware revealed on last night’s earnings conference call that revenues from its low-end Essentials license SKU grew 100% from the first quarter of this year to the second. This is an interesting data point given VMware’s recent moves to lower pricing and add features such as VMotion to…

Hello all, I have heard recently that people are calling for help with SRM, and generally do not provide logs, so we need to ask for logs, and so it stretches out how quick you get help with SRM. If you want the quickest and smooth support experience, I recommend you start by gathering your SRM…

We're happy to announce that VMware VIX 1.10.1 is now publicly available. The new version includes support for vSphere 4.1, Workstation 7.1, and Player 3.1. You can get it here. Happy programming!

Came across this great article on setting up a scripted installation of vSphere 4.1.

Here is a quote from the article...

"Scripted installation is a new feature for ESXi which is introduced with the release of vSphere 4.1. In this article I’m describing the setup of my home lab in which I use…

If you have a couple of minutes, I could really use a favor. This favor is for my own benefit (and Crystal's benefit), but it should only take a couple minutes of your time. Thanks!

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

VMware vCenter Converter is VMware's free product that converts physical machines to virtual machines. Learn more in this super definition.

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An e-mail from the VMware User Group Team: VMware User Group Members, As announced earlier this year, VMware is supporting the establishment of an independent, customer-led, customer-driven global VMware User Group (VMUG). The VMUG Steering Committee has been focused on forming the structure for…

PowerCLI has several cmdlets that work inside the guest of a VM: Guest network interface cmdlets: Get-VMGuestNetworkInterface, Set-VMGuestNetworkInterface Guest route cmdlets: Get-VMGuestRoute, Set-VMGuestRoute, New-VMGuestRoute, Remove-VMGuestRoute Resizing of guest disk partitions: Set-HardDisk…

Veeam monitor 5.0 fully supports vSphere 4.1 As expected, few days after the release of vSphere 4.1, Veeam announced the Beta of Veeam Monitor 5. With the new product, there will of course be full support for vSphere 4.1 but also many more new features. Take a look at some of the details already…

The lament of many cloud compute providers as we engage with them… “I wish someone would offer a storage subsystem:” Was transactional (which VMware needs today to host VMDK storage) – but scaled, so I could manage at scale with...

As you may or may not know, the new vCenter 4.1 requires that the host it runs on is 64 bit. As 4.0 and previous versions weren’t supported on 64 bit at all, this probably means that when you upgrade you will need to move your existing database to a new host. There are several [...]

Cloud and hosting providers are aggressively investing in new Intel Xeon servers that can have as many as 32 cores per server (4 processors with 8 cores per server). Some of this investment is in response to current demand for actual capacity from customers. Some of it is investing ahead of the…

In vSphere 4.1 a new network Load Based Teaming (LBT) algorithm is available on the distributed virtual switch dvPort groups. The option “Route based on physical NIC load” takes the virtual machine network I/O load into account and tries to avoid congestion by dynamically reassigning and…

Welcome to my new playground. I used to post quite a lot over at my old site, h0bbel.p0ggel.org but given it’s weird domain name and it’s long history I’ve decided to start fresh. This new site will be dedicated to all things virtualization, PowerShell, Windows Server management and possibly…

Hi,

This year again the SAP LinuxLab workshop happened in St. Leon Rot at the SAP LinuxLab.
VMware was one of the participants and did a lot of Performance and functional testing.
Especially the results around Memory throughput and the "best" Linux I/O scheduler are interesting.
The Test-setup…

SAP has released it's new Discovery System in Version 4.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/discoverysystem

What is SAP Discovery System ?

SAP Discovery system is a preconfigured and
preinstalled SAP landscape that can help you explore SAP products before
deploying new software in your…

Scripted installation is  a new feature for ESXi which is introduced with the release of vSphere 4.1. In this article I’m describing the setup of my home lab in which I use this new feature. Please be advised that this article assumes some basic understanding of Windows and ESX and gives you…

Are you managing or thinking of implementing a VMware View environment?  If so here’s a potential gotcha to look out for.  As you may or may not have heard with the introduction of VMware vSphere 4.1 the vCenter Server has now gone 64bit which is good news in the interests of moving towards pure…

Chad Sakac’s blog posts have recruited many of the industry’s brightest and most dedicated technical specialists. I hope to duplicate his efforts here and help get the word out that technical pre-sales experts and evangelists are needed throughout the Asia Pacific region. We are hiring big in…

I recently wrote an article about vMA 4.1 and Active Directory Integration and today I noticed there were some confusion on the expected behavior of the two types of authentication policy: vi-fastpass authentication versus Active Directory authentication. There are actually a few things to consider:

• …

I gave about 20 speeches about desktop virtualization in 2009, and one of the core tenants of those was that Windows 7 and desktop virtualization are sort of “codependent” on each other. I felt since most companies were still on Windows XP...(read more)<img><img>

VMware vSphere 4.1 was release on 13 July 2010 last week. VMware vSphere 4.1 introduced an impressive number of new features and new licensing format. The following is complete VMware vSphere 4.1 license comparison chart. click to enlarge. Please feel free to download from here. Related…

By any measure, FT (Fault Tolerance) is a ground-breaking technology. Introduced a year ago with vSphere 4.0, FT enables an application to continue uninterrupted even after a complete and catastrophic physical server failure. But how does it work? What is...

One feature that I am somewhat mixed on is the vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI).

As many of you already know there is an issue with the encryption mechanism of ESX(i) 4.1. When passwords are used which are longer than 8 characters the password will be truncated after the 8th character. As such during authentication only the first 8 characters are used. In other words if you…

Welcome to the latest edition of the Virtualization Vendor Profile. Every once in a while I’ll talk with a smaller or lesser-known company, learn about their business, discuss some industry trends, and write up a recap. Last week I covered the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference for our VAR-…

Check out our technical paper on ESX CPU scheduler in vSphere 4.1. This is revised from the previous version to reflect a new feature, wide VM NUMA support. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How is CPU time...

This one has been bothering me lately. Where do you place your Virtual Machine Swap files?

There are two options:

1. In the Same Directory  as the VM
2. In the Datastore specified by the host.

As you can see below.

image[3]

If you choose the second option then you can configure the swap location per…

You may remember from a recent article that I wrote about the VMware licensing dilemmas, that one of the scenarios I mentioned was SRM licensing when a customer wants to protect only a small percentage of VMs.  In the per-CPU licensing model, a customer would have to license all of the CPUs in a…

In PowerCLI 4.1 we changed the namespaces in which output types live. This was done to improve the internal structure and enable other VMware teams to write cmdlets for the products they develop. While the types remain the same (save...

July 14, 2010 Kirk Munro posted last week about the PowerCLI 4.1: A fork in the road regarding changes in namespaces that were introduced in the new version of PowerCLI 4.1. Scott Herold of Vizioncore also posted an article regarding these Changes - vEcoShell 1.2.6 and PowerCLI 4.1.

First and…

The Dell TechCenter VMware Technical Wiki Page just went live recently. This wiki page is intended to provide technical content around Dell solutions stacks utilizing VMware products. It will be monitored and updated regularly by VMware architects. I do not see much information so far and If you are…

When you read books on virtualization, cloud computing, security, or software product sheets a common word that shows up is Policy. Tools often claim to implement Policy, while books urge you to read or write your Policy. But what does Policy imply? Webster (webster.com) defines policy as: 1 a…

PowerCLI 4.1 introduces easier way to initialize ManagedObjectRefernce (MoRef) instances which are necessary while playing with the Get-View cmdlet. Till now there were several ways to get MoRefs. The most popular one is to get the view object and to...

If you spend a lot of time building and testing ThinApp packages, you may have a use for this handy utility. By installing ThinReg Helper, you can add thinreg.exe’s functionality directly to Windows Explorer, saving you the effort of running...

There’s a cool new feature added to vSphere 4.1 for HA. If an error occurs you can easily check what the issue is by going to your cluster and clicking the “Cluster Operational Issues” line on the Summary tab. If there are no issues the screen will be completely gray. I forced an issue though…

Mike Bean Hello Virtual World! I’m writing this week’s column a little early, so my fan (Hi Mom!) will have something to read next week, as I am taking a short vacation. It’s a personal tradition of mine that I...

At last vDS features are here with the new PowerCLI. The vSphere PowerCLI 4.1 release is the first touch of PowerCLI with vNetwork distributed switches, so please don’t expect to find fully supported vDS functionality in it. Still as you...

In a VDI environment each CPU cycle, megabyte of memory or disk IO that can be reduced may represent considerable performance improvement when the workload is characterized by hundreds or thousands of desktops. Disk alignment is a topic that has been discussed to exhaustion, but the use of the…

Microsoft released the Hyper-V R2 SP1 beta and VMware launched vSphere 4.1 in the same week, kicking off the latest round in the fight for server virtualization market supremacy.

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vSphere 4.1 introduces a lot of new features and enhancements of the existing features, one of the hidden gems I believe is the DPM enable and disable scheduled tasks. The DPM “Change cluster power settings” schedule task allows the administrator to enable or disable DPM via an automated task.…

The CPU Scheduler is one of the core features on any ESX host. Its role is to balance and provide resources in an ESX environment. In modern times when servers are equipped with multiple CPU’s and multiple cores per CPU the allocation of such resources and ultimately the host performance depends…

It’s possible to use a serial port now on your physical host in ESXi 4.1 Few months back, way before the ESXi 4.1 went out I wrote an article about ESXi 4 which was not supporting serial ports. Serial ports are used for locally attached serial devices like a FAX/modems or some UPS devices. This…

RES Software released PowerFuse Service Release 9. This release contains several enhancements, fixes and also one important change; Limited support for Microsoft Windows 2000. This version of RES PowerFuse cannot be installed on Microsoft Windows 2000 using a full install (MSI Package). It is…

Posted by Winston Bumpus Director of Standards Architecture, VMware I’m Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture at VMware and president of the Distributed Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF). I want to share some thoughts on the ever-evolving cloud computing environment,...

The following tables list all the managed object types in VI 3.5, vSphere 4 and 4.1. A short description is provided for each type explaining its major responsibilities. Note that the managed object types are added in an incremental way. The types in older versions are still supported in newer…

To support VLANs for VMware Infrastructure users, the virtual or physical network must tag the Ethernet frames with 802.1Q tags using virtual switch tagging (VST), virtual machine guest tagging (VGT), or external switch tagging (EST). If you’re looking for how to configure VLAN tagging in VMware…

Untitled Document We have 31 vendors exhibit in the DEMO Lab at BriForum 2010 in Chicago this year. Each of these vendors showed off their latest and greatest stuff, but unfortunately not everyone had a chance to visit every demo. So like last year ,...(read more)<img><img>

Cloud computing no longer a new term to many of us, and we can see how the cloud computing concept had innovated the IT infrastructure in the current environment for the pass 24 months. Today we have those familiar term such as SOD = Storage On Demand, COD – Cloud on Demand, Provision &…

On Thursday July 15th, a user raised a question on the VMTN forums regarding an ESXi 4.1 password issue. The problem was described as the following:

Hi all
It seems that authentication only requires the first 8 characters to be correct. My root password is 11 characters long, but so long as the…

I received this Paper a while back and think it is an excellent read. I just copied a random part of the paper to give you an idea of what it covers. There’s not much more to say about it then just read it, it is as in-depth as it can get on FT. I [...]

Take a pile of smart just with backgrounds from Sun, Netapp and Data Domain, throw in a few PHDs (I assume) and see what falls out; thats Nimble Storage who launched at Gestalt IT TechFieldDay Seattle.

The company was formed in 2008, based in San Jose. The two founders are

• Varun Mehta (Sun, NetApp,…

So I’m traveling a bit outside of my normal realm and am hanging out in South Florida for a bit. What does that mean? Well outside excellent bicycling weather and humidity, it also means local area vMUGs! Two of them in fact. Come on out and let’s talk Virt! Details: South Florida Area vMUG…

Well, how’s that for blummin’ obscure blog post title. This is for a very small number of readers who say yes to the following questions: Own a iPhone4 Own a Mazda MX5 (Latest model type) Have the Bose Sound system Have the optional iPOD connector in the glove compartment My iPOD cable is long…

New Security advisory regarding VUM Synopsis: VMware vCenter Update Manager fix for Jetty Web server addresses important security vulnerabilities Issue date: 2010-07-19 Updated on: 2010-07-19 (initial release of advisory) CVE numbers: CVE-2009-1523 CVE-2009-1524 1. Summary VMware vCenter Update…

At IPM, we are big fans of the PSTools for scripts, troubleshooting and overall use.  Jacques Bensimon sent over this handy tip regarding their use.

If you’ve accidentally hung up a script or scheduled task by using a SysInternals PSTools utility  (PSExec, PSList, PSService, etc) and…

I say AyePhone. Because if your from the North of England, when anyone say iPhone – it always makes think of some Yorkshire Sheep Farmer. Aye… Phone. I don’t normally blog about consumer based stuff because – well, basically I don’t care too much about it to be honest. Occasionally, you…

This was a project I worked on in the background and I am thrilled to see it come into its own and be part of OpenStack.

Congrats to Chris Kemp and behind the scenes -Bobby, Josh, and Kim - you got it done.

In September 2008, Red Hat acquired Israel-based company Qumranet for $107 million and with it the company's virtualization solutions, including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) remote protocol.

read more

I was asked if I could ask my readers to fill out the following survey. Hopefully all of you will be so kind to fill it out and help VMware taking the next logical step, which ever that might be. Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz today. But when people talk about cloud, do [...]

Do you know John Martin? If the name doesn't ring a bell then allow me to introduce you to John. He's worked for a number of storage vendors in his 25 year career including Legato, Veritas, StorageTek, EMC, and NetApp....

Is Med-V only a 'point solution' to ease migration or can you use that functionality to a wider audience to solve other problems? When considering Med-v as part of MDOP, is it a useful client hypervisor tool for reducing desktop management costs. Related posts:

1. News: XenDesktop 4 – Fulfilling the…

VMware ESX Downloading the license file fails (1017928) Date Published: 7/12/2010 Cannot power on a virtual machine and you receive an Admission Check Failed error (1018180) Date Published: 7/12/2010 Powering on virtual machines fails with the error: MAX VCPUs limit...

Now that vSphere ESXi 4.1 is out and available for download here, I wanted to upgrade my home lab with the latest release. Whilst ISO’s got downloaded, I searched VMware KB for any tips on how to perform the upgrade and I found KB1022140: Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 The KB article comes with…

The VIRTUMANIA continues with Episode 19! Rick Vanover joins Marc and I again along with very special guest Ed Haletky for an extremely important discussion about security in virtualization infrastructure. The following is the podcast summary: VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 19 – Security is The Dark…

Memory reclaiming techniques in vSphere 4.1 With the recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 there has been a new feature announced – memory compression. This fourth memory optimization technique adds itself to the list of present memory optimisation process – Transparent page sharing (TPS), Memory…

Blogger , speaker, consultant, and friend of the site Tim Mangan just released a book (today!) about App-V. Tim's been in this space a long time (and is one of five people who have spoken at all eight BriForums), but this is his first book. I interviewed...(read more)<img><img>

Following some twitter banter, an added PSP to 4.1 was made known to me. PSP’s, as you know, are Path Selection Plug-in’s, which under the umbrella of NMP and ultimately PSA, provide physical path selection for I/O requests. As of 4.0, the following VMware NMP PSPs were supported…

• MRU-Most…

T.Rex still is a good listen. # RockOn # Powered by Twitter Tools Related Posts: Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates

For those that use VMware's vMA vi-fastpass authentication (vifpinit which is now vifptarget) which allows a user to perform an operation on an ESX(i) or vCenter host without having to provide credentials each time, may notice a change with the resxtop command. In vMA 4.0, if you initialized a…

The latest release of vMA 4.1 now supports Active Directory integration which can be used to centralize all authentication within a Windows environment. To join a vMA host to your Active Directory domain, you just need to use one simple command called domainjoin-cli which is part of Likewise's…

A big vendor in the networking and Internet market is F5. We visited them on the Gestalt IT TechFieldDay Seattle.

Kirby Wadsworth (VP of Global Marketing) did a who F5 are and what they do. F5 see themselves as the strategic point of control in…

Friday I was at a customer to upgrade their ESXi 4.0 (free) to version 4.1. This should have been an easy task, download CD, burn it and install. This wasn’t the case, the new ESXi 4.1 wouldn’t install, it kept freezing during the extract of the cim.vgz file. The problem occurred on both the…

This week my companies email account has changed from Exchange to Zimbra Collaboration Server due to my participation in an internal pilot program. This is great because I’m already using the Zimbra server and also the desktop client  privately for a while and I’m really happy with it. What…

My good friend Amrit Williams (@amrittsering) from BigFix (congrats on the IBM acquisition!) has an awesome Podcast titled “Beyond the Perimeter.” He was nice enough to invite me to record episode 93 titled “Is Trust the Real Barrier To Cloud Computing?” (ultimately points you to an iTunes…

It was just over a year ago that vSphere was launched and now is time for the first major update to the product. On Tuesday 13th vSphere 4.1 was released to the public, my apologies for the timing of this blog post but as always work has taken priority. 4.1 is much more than a [...]

vCenter Integration with Acronis Backup and recovery Advanced Server. In one of my previous videos I showed you the utilization of Acronis for Exchange. This backup solution is suitable for backing up and restoring e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange. And the restore individual e-mail feature…

Twitter is good! Twitter is great! Today, late in the evening my time, I started to read tweets about a major security issue within ESX4.1.0. It all started with a post from nirvy in a VMware forum followed by an article and a tweet from lamw that I encourage you to read at virtuallyGhetto.com…

Today I bought a Mac Mini running Mac OS X Server, but found that the dual 500GB hard drives weren't mirrored. Here's how I fixed that problem.

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

libvirt is: A toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). Free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. A long term stable C API A set of bindings for common languages A CIM provider for the DMTF virtualization schema…

vSphere 4.1 is out. You have already upgraded VMware vCenter Server to 4.1. You realize that you downloaded vCenter Server 4.1 and either your ESX 4.1 or ESXi 4.1 media. But… You didn’t download the vSphere 4.1 client.  Remember that the 4.1 client is not included in the installation of ESX or…

Image via Wikipedia I don’t have time to write a big blog post and quite frankly, I don’t need to. Not on this topic. I do, however, feel that it’s important to bring back into consciousness how very important open source security solutions are to us — at least those of us who actually…

Run the latest VMware Hypervisor ESXi 4.1 in 7 minutes. In this new video which is destined to people who do not know that with VMware there is the amazing possibility to Install and test and run the latest hypervisor as a Virtual Machine. By using VMware Workstation 7.1 I’ll show you the install…

It’s the last presentation of the day and the last presentation overall for Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Seattle.  We’ve made a short journey from the Microsoft store in Redmond, WA to to NEC in Bellevue.  Anyone who knows the NEC brand is aware of their diverse portfolio of products and perhaps…

During the vSphere 4.1 beta period, two of my clients were very interested in the new Host Affinity Rules for issues they were having.  The day vSphere 4.1 was released I had a call to discuss Host Affinity Rules with another client to explore issues they were having that host affinity rules could…

Vyatta has released a new training course to help customers who are evaluating Vyatta for routing and security in VMware and XenServer. This course will show you common use cases as well as installation, verification and basic configuration of Vyatta OVF and XVA virtual appliances for adding routing &…

vSPC Many admins rely on using serial port console connections to manage physical servers. These connections usually provide a non-graphical and hence low-bandwidth remote console approach for administering physical servers. Administrators use physical serial port concentrators to multiplex…