Planet V12n

RT @djamesgraham David Jarvis has joined New Age Healthcare IT, a division of New Age Technologies… <–Welcome aboard Dave. # RT @coolsport00 Happy Groundhog Day! <–Complete with "I've got you babe" on the alarm clock. # Powered by Twitter Tools Related Posts: Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly…

VMware View adapter for vCenter Operations is close to GA date. That’s is fantastic; and it will give VMware View administrators the long waited insight on what’s happening with the virtual desktops and virtual desktop infrastructure. VMware View adapter will provide several metrics. However,…

I am very excited and honoured to be a delegate for the next Tech Field Day. Virtualization Field Day 2 is running from February 22 – 24, 2012 in Silicon Valley. I’ve always thought that the Tech Field days have been great whether you were a delegate or watching the streaming content. While all…

It’s odd, I’ve worked for one of the best VMware partners for almost four years (woah!) now and this will be the first time that I’ve gone to Partner Exchange.  I’m excited!  Why?  Well…like I said, I’ve never been plus the content looks great AND when I’m there I’m just…

A couple of challenges that a lot of us in the industry face are that of keeping our skills sharp and having the capability to learn new products and technologies.  At Varrow we have a very fundamental engineering culture.  The company was built around that and it’s something we constantly work…

It’s that time again when Eric Siebert from vSphere-Land.com kicks off voting for the ‘Top 25 VMware Virtualization Blogs’.

As he points out in his blog post, there are now over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware and Virtualization – this is definitely an impressive number which is a real…

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, VMware. As promised last week an update that includes new white papers. First one is by Venky Deshpande and is about VDS best practices, highly recommend read. The second paper is by VMware's storage guru Cormac Hogan. Anything that Cormac writes is worth…

As I wrote in my previous post about New year resolution, I would like to build a good enought vSphere home lab.Finally I get it.First of all the list of hardware ingredients:Motherboard: P8Z68-V Asus P8Z68-V Z68 i7/i5/i3 SLI/CrossFire DDR3CPU: Intel Core i7 2600 3.40GHz Cache 8MB Sandy Bridge…

I´ve mentioned this earlier, VMware hands-in labs going public in 2012, but finally it seems like something is happening in that regard! Scott Sauer has announced the availability of “VMware Virtual Customer Labs” (vCL) where he walks us through the setup and delivery of the new vCL offering.…

This months monster edition of vNews is feature length presentation. So sit back relax as you hear our dulcet tones discuss the news. It’s bumper packed because it includes news of Dec and Jan compiled into one meaty edition. As ever you welcome to download the vNews PPT file for use at your VMUG.…

Introduction VMware made an exciting announcement at VMworld 2011 that didn’t get much press or attention.  The VMworld labs were slated to be released for customers interested in doing technology previews of our software solutions in early 2012.  Notice I didn’t use the term “Proof of…

I read a good blog article recently about a caveat with SSH keys and Lockdown Mode in ESXi 5 by William Lam at virtuallyGhetto. Now that SSH keys are fully supported in ESXi 5, and this will allow an authorized user to continue to log into the host even when Lockdown Mode is enabled, is [...]

SSH for the host has been enabled – how to disable this message. The other day when I updated my very old article on How to activate SSH on ESXi, I thought that I have posted already an article on the deactivation of the ssh for the host has been enabled warning message in vSphere [...]

In a few day VMware Partner Exchange 2012 kicks off in Las Vegas. Besides a lot of pre-conference Bootcamps, Exhibition Hall and and the party there are of course many...

There was an interesting question on twitter from Matt Cowger yesterday asking how to modify the IP Address of the Analytics VM in the new vCenter Operations 5 vApp after it has been deployed. The new VC Ops 5 is actually composed of two virtual machines: UI and Analytics VM. As part of the initial…

For those of you that follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I’ve been having some fun this week with changing out the default VMware generated SSL certificates on a greenfields deployment of vSphere 5 that will be supporting a large public cloud. Changing certificates is nothing new, and in…

Something is finally moving with VCAP5 exams: last new was really old and only related on the feedback on blueprint of DCD (and also DCA).

Now a new information is that the beta period of the VCAP5-DCD exam will run from February 13^th, 2012 through March 2^nd, 2012 (thanks VMware for the larger time…

While playing with VMware vCenter Server Appliance in my home lab, I have been surprised with the following error: Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation. This error has came up while trying to change authentication to active directory authentication and kinda seen the same error when…

Earlier this evening while playing “Go to sleep daddy so I can stick my finger up your nose” with my 2yo I received my invitation to sit the VCAP5-DCD.  Needless to say I’m exhausted from thinking about certification exams but I’m going to give it a go before the deadline of March 2. …

Whilst sitting in a vCD Deep Dive presentation by Aidan Dalgliesh and David Hill last week at the London VMUG they explained an issue which has been reported on multiple occasions, they have seen this more than once on customer...

Today I hit a number of topics:

• HP and Wikibon webcast with Dave Vellante
• HP Tech Day recap on HP Converged Infrastructure blog
• HP StoreOnce B6200 videos and white papers
• Nekkid Tech Podcast with Marc Farley
• Save the date for HP Discover in Las Vegas
• VMware vSphere 5 video training

REMEMBER – tune in for the big reveal on EMC Project Lightning on Monday (which will itself include the “hello world” of Lightning, but also the “hello world” for the NEXT big project in that vein) here. Trust me –...

In a recent article, VCP 5 certification course deadline looms over VMware pros both vNinja.net contributors (Christian and Ed) are quoted in relation to the VCP 5 certification upgrade deadline of February 29th 2012. While I can´t speak for Ed, I can clarify my own comments a bit. The following is…

VMware will be performing system maintenance to several VMware web applications Friday, February 17, 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM Pacific Time. If you need to file a support request while the upgrade is in progress, you will need to call...

Exploring my private datacenter through vCD. Recently I has been offered a full private datacenter at Stratogen. You can read the post here. I must tell you that I’m new to vCloud Director, I haven’t tested this product in my lab yet. But will do.  So as for now even the exploration of the…

I recently had the opportunity to configure my first set of Cisco 6248 fabric interconnects for Cisco UCS. These are a bit different from the 6100 series FI’s that Cisco has been using since it’s release. The 6120 and 6140 fabric interconnects required an expansion module to be purchased and…

Here is another video tutorial brought to you by the KBTV team. This video is short, snappy and straight to the point... and the point being, how quick, easy, and painless it is to license VMware Workstation 8. The video...

Posted by Gina Bollenback Global Alliance Marketing Communications Manager In this week’s News Around the Network, we focused on highlighting successful joint products, upcoming events, and valuable resources for VMware and partner customers: FlexPod Success Story: The Walz Group (The Virtual…

I have seen a couple of times now posts in various places about connection issues with the vCloud Director remote console.  I wanted to write up a few short things that seem to be the most common things that folks have run into when configuring the remote console section of vCloud Director.  The…

Recently I got involved in a discussion about “Creating multiple Datacenters with one Clusters rather than one Datacenter with multiple Clusters” First of all lets get the definitions of these objects summarized (as stated in the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide) Clusters A collection of…

Virtualization Certification, It used to be just VMware and the VCP, but things have changed as other players get involved and I thought it would be interesting to see what virtualization certification options there are out there. [...]

Virtualization Certification: What Options are Available?|The…

VMware pros who are under pressure to complete their VCP 5 exam before Feb. 29 to avoid additional requirements yearn for Microsoft-style exams, which don?t require costly courses.

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This is a few months old, but I just thought I’d share it here. David, as well as the entire TrainSignal team, are absolute professionals. Great online training and all around fun people! Check out other fun interviews on vmwarevideos.com

Posted by Cormac Hogan Technical Marketing Manager (Storage) If you've got an ALUA array, you've probably wondered what all those obscure configration settings mean in the esxcli device listing. I certainly have. Let me show you what I mean. ~ # esxcli storage nmp device list -d naa.xxx naa.xxx…

The new version of OpenStack, which will be released in Q2 of 2012, does not support Microsoft Hyper-V anymore. The developers have had enough with the buggy code. One of the developers of OpenStack has written a patch with which the Hyper-V code and support will be removed from the cloud platform.…

NOTE: The first couple of minutes of this weeks vendorwag suffers from a bit of Skype latency, where the odd word is lost here and there. However, the call quality does improve massively after the first 2 or 3 minutes. Stick with us! This weeks vendorwag is with Gil Levonai of Zerto. In case you…

  A very quick posting that the voting is now open for the top VMware & virtualization blogs. Eric Siebert runs this every year and this year has even been sponsored by Trainsignal. I’m very honoured to be included on the list of blogs available to be voted for.So if any of my blog postings [...]

vSphere 5 introduced support for utilizing multiple network interfaces per single host for vMotion transfer. This is very useful feature for systems which are limited to 1 Gigabit network as migrating multiple VMs off a host can take very long time with 1 Gigabit vMotion network. Multiple NIC…

During the upgrade to Workstation 8.0.2 (on 64 bit Windows 7 OS) I’ve got a curios issue that I want to share.

Basically for some strange reason the previous version was not removed correctly and the new one was not able to install itself because the setup program fail during the old version…

I’ll start off by saying the vast majority of users will never be able to tell the difference with Build to Lossess(BTL) turned off or on. VMware recommends in its PCOIP Performance Best Practices to have it turned off by default. BTL turned off is one of three major bandwidth saving in View 5.0.…

Today I have been reading an interesting article about Bring Your Own Device. I loved the title; The Dark Side of BYOD and it covered Privacy, Personal Data Loss and Device seizure. Do read it for the complete story. It … Continue reading →

Train Signal is at it again, releasing their brand new VMware View 5 Essentials Training videos last week. If you haven’t ever tried a Train Signal video or purchased one, you are definitely missing out. Train Signal gives you the opportunity to experience in classroom training from the comfort of…

Last Friday afternoon, my HP social media colleague and friend Marc Farley said this on Twitter: It is with some sadness and a lot of excitement that I tell you today is my last day at HP. The best run of my career. Thanks all !

Marc had called me the week before to say that he had turned down a…

Prologue:  Who am I?  Chad Sakac?!  This post got to be ridiculously long-winded, but it has tons of good info in it, and I certainly encourage a full read!  Sorry for the length, but I wanted to share as much as I could… It’s no secret that I love social media.  Hell, just look at my page.…

At VMworld last year Trend Micro already announced their new version Deep Security 8, but now it is finally available. Deep Security is specifically designed for virtual environments. Its agent-less architecture addresses AV storms, minimizes operational complexity of security and allows…

Hi Scripters! I got excellent news today! Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a great deal of work with the Cisco UCSPowerTool which provides PowerShell functionality for managing your Cisco UCS server environment. I began using this tool last summer with a simple 149 cmdlets. It…

I just read an interesting article on achieving PCI compliance for SMBs (PCI DSS compliance — what does it look like for a small business?) From my standpoint I see a couple of key takeaways. The first is that any company that stores, processes or transmits credit card data has...

If there is a demand for a product, technology or service and a limited supply prices and profit margins can rise if costs are contained.

I have started to play with vCenter Operations in lab environments, to evaluate it and see if there is a production use case. Below I have listed for useful information, some tips and tricks and some best practices that proved useful in the course of the evaluation. These will be updated over [...]…

Over the past couple of weeks, the VMware Fusion team has hit the road to meet face to face with VMware Fusion users. It’s always exciting for us to get the chance to meet more of the VMware Fusion community...

I wanted to share with everyone a little post about my exposure to CentOS 6.2 Minimal.  If you are not aware with the latest release of CentOS 6.2 there is now a “Minimal” ISO option.  Now let me tell you first off when they say minimal….it’s got next to nothing.  Personally, I love that…

Since vSphere 4.1 it has been possible to integrate ESXi user authentication with Active Directory. In vSphere 4.1 AD group which was use to grant root permissions on ESXi host was hard coded as “ESX Admins” so you had to change your AD group structure to match that. With vSphere 5 it is now…

Over the past week I had the pleasure of attending VPLEX training in...

I was importing the VC Ops virtual appliance and during the import I got a question around IP addresses. So I figured I would enter two IP addresses and that would be it. As soon as I powered on the VM I received the following error: Cannot initialize property ‘vami.netmask0.VM_1′ since network…

There have been a lot of discussions lately about a topic I find extremely interesting: vendor lock-in.

Multi-hypervisor is a discipline where you can apply the high level ranting below but you can really apply it to pretty much everything in IT.

I started this blog . . . → Read More: The ABC of…

I recently needed to install vCenter Orchestrator client on a Windows 7 x64 machine, to connect to an Orchestration server on the infrastructure. (As was typically the case, I’ve done this already then forgotten how to do it, so this is a reminder for me as well as a how-to for you!) Previously,…

The APAC BrownBags kicked off last night with a VCAP-DCD study group. The Video Slides More BrownBags You can find all our past recordings for both the VCP5 series as well as every other topic we’ve covered (50+ hours) here: http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/

The Video: Some Notes (From #BrownBag on twitter) @DuncanYB: New Article: Creating an IP-Pool for VC Ops – http://bit.ly/yKSLdM If you’re up in 6 hours, join @DemitasseNZ for an APAC version http://t.co/ZSCLaX9O Another great VCP5 resource can be found on @mwpreston’s blog:…

As most of my vFriends would know, I’m a huge fan of blogging and social media in general. I think it’s a great mechanism to reach out to the masses for the means to educate, and to push out messaging in a wide scale. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for blogging and [...]

Microsoft are once again running their TechDays series in the UK, a series of full-day FREE hands-on sessions on training around the UK. I’ve attended these in the past and can highly recommend them. There look to be some excellent sessions, you can sign up here I am attending the private cloud…

Was surprised to hear that the date for this years VMworld Europe event has changed. Back in San Francisco the boards were saying October 16-18th. The location remains the same – Barcelona – but the event is now due to happen the week before from the 9-11th October. So time to update your…

I recently took and passed the Cisco UCS Design Specialist exam 642-982. There was not a lot of information out there on this exam so I thought that I would write a short summary of my thoughts. To start off I was not sure what to expect out of the exam because there is very [...]

OK. Its perhaps a bit early for the presidential elections – but it’s never too early to vote in Eric Siebert’s every popular popularity contest. If you vote for me, I promise to cry and thank my mom & dad… Eric  has once again started a poll to ask people to vote for their favorite [...]

One of the things I like to do when ever we have an event with independent bloggers is to highlight their blog posts.  I do it for two reasons:

1. I want you to read what others are saying - their independent voices carry weight.
2. These bloggers take time away from their day jobs to visit us and I…

For unknown reasons, VMware has changed the dates of the VMworld Europe 2012.

It will be still in Barcelona, but no more 16-18 October, but sooner, 9-12 October. Update you calendars, hoping none of you has been too early on booking ;)

VMTurbo has broken new ground by delivering the first application aware automated service assurance solution for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. This is the first solution that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of these platforms and their control API's to actually…

I was asked recently to write a script to get a count of virtual machines with Flexible adapters that did not have VMware tools installed. The number was surprising to me. 10% of all VMs were Flexible with no VMware Tools. While having a Flexible type network adapter is fine and not having VMware…

NetApp has today updated it’s Powershell Toolkit, DataONTAP to version 1.7. I’ve said it before but a rebranding to PowerONTAP would be a much cooler! The major features include: VHD/VMDK file conversion. You can use ConvertTo-NaVhd and ConvertTo-NaVmdk to use NetApp FlexClone to convert…

One common question is “which certification should I get?” or “which is the best one?”… As usual it depends and is not a simple “objective” choice because it also depends on your needs and on what is required (in the IT field), that could also depends year by year.

Read more on Top IT…

Well, there is probably quite a lot I don't know about VMFS sub-blocks to be honest, but I recently learnt something new about sub-blocks on VMFS which I thought I already understood, but clearly didn't. Sub-blocks are small allocations on a VMFS volume, and they are used to back small files. This…

In my new role at NetApp, I am getting the opportunity to do many cool and interesting projects (goes without saying; NetApp is an awesome company!). My role so far consists of preparing technical reports concerning virtualized workloads on VMware vSphere and NetApp, giving technical input to…

VMware Fusion 4.1 costing less. VMware Fusion Promos are finished. Wait, not really. The latest promo which saved you $30 on the full price 79.90 is now permanent…. It means that the new price of VMware 4.1 is now only $49.99.  The latest VMware Fusion brought more than 90 new features and is…

AppSync is a great update mechanism for certain use cases (more information on the AppSync feature can be found here). When you have deployed a new version is it very likely you want to perform a new thinreg registration on...

Here's the next session summary from the HP Tech Day held in Ft. Collins last week.  This summary is based on the VMware integration session lead by Eric Siebert (VMware Solutions Manager) and Aboubacar Diare (VMware Integration Lead Engineer). 

 I have decent audio of this session - if you…

At their Build conference this past September, Microsoft spend a fair amount of time discussing and demoing their plans for RDP and RemoteFX in Windows 8. I finally took the time to watch the videos from the conference, and I gotta say: RemoteFX and RDP...(read more)<img><img>

It is my experience that resource pools are nearly a four letter word in the virtualization world. Typically I see a look of fear or confusion when I bring up the topic. Even with some other great resources out there that discuss this topic, a lack of education remains on how resource pools work,…

by Neal Mueller Many Oracle products, including the database, are licensed by physical processor. This licensing model works well in a physical world, in which customers typically run one application per host and physical processors are easy to track. But this model is not well-adapted to a virtual…

Today I had a call with Nutanix. I saw them at VMworld for the first time and saw them again last week in Palo Alto, Ca. Many other bloggers already wrote articles about them, like Duncan Epping. The mission of … Continue reading →

Transitioning on-premise datacenters into on-premise private clouds might seem as easy as flipping a switch. In reality, we're not so lucky.

Atlantis Computing gets rid of the disk, which turns into a significant speed-up of IO performance in a virtualized environment.

Posted by Anne-Marie Clegg Global Alliance Programs VMware recently launched the 5.0 version of the VMware vCenter Operations Management™ Suite which represents one of VMware’s 3 management product suites. To get a comprehensive overview of the operations management suite, I recommend reviewing…

Getting SUSE Enterprise Linux integrated with Microsoft Active Directory is much easier than it sounds. There are a few prerequisites to meet before: Samba client must be installed. Packages samba-winbind and krb5-client must be installed. The primary DNS server must be the Domain Controller. For…

Today I was talking to a customer about their VDI installation which is hosted on VMware vSphere 4.1 but the broker solution used by them is not VMware View. Currently they’re in a difficult situation as an update of the broker software requires them to have Windows 7 Embedded on their thin…

Thanks to @VirtualClarity (http://www.virtualclarity.com/) for posting an interesting link on Twitter. The video features an interview with Tony Kerrison, CTO at ING who’ve rolled-out VDI into theit IT landscape.  …

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization...

Lots has been written (here on the vspecialist.co.uk blog and elsewhere) about how useful cloud computing is and how we can’t avoid cloud services in the digital age. Working in the industry, my viewpoint is always squewed in one way or another – sometimes for and sometimes against once the…

Here is our Top 20 KB list for January 2012. This list is ranked by the number of times a VMware Support Service Request was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledge Base article. Methods of upgrading to...

Announced at the London VMUG meeting on 26th January, vSpecialist.co.uk and Virtual Clarity present the first VCDX Defence Practice Event. VCDX is VMware’s premier / flagship certification “for design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments”, and is aimed at “professionals…

Many networking devices like routers and switches, implement a NetFlow protocol which is used to export information of passing network traffic to a specific NetFlow collector application for analysis and visualization. Back in days, VMware ESX 3.5 had experimental support for NetFlow but it was…

  Hopefully you had a chance to read my last blog post on how to setup and install the Virtual Storage Integrator – Storage Viewer plugin for vCenter.  If not, you will want to go back and review it before moving on to this next plugin.  You can certainly install these independently of each…

Having recently made a right old mess of my home lab, I set about building it from scratch over the weekend. Having installed some nice, fresh builds of ESXi 5.0 I started adding in my SATA disks and began to create VMFS datastores on the hosts. The first one worked ok. The second one didn’t for…

During a health check I needed to know the SAN/iQ version, installed patches and the up-time of the HP P4000 storage nodes because of a nasty bug in SAN/iQ 9.0 or 9.0.01 that hang or reboot nodes after 208.5 days (More information about the bug can be found in the HP Customer Advisory found here)…

Feb 6th will be an exciting day! The covers will come off EMC Project Lightning, something we’ve alluded to in 2011. In fact, for those of you at VMworld, I did a demo of lightning integrated into vCenter in SPO3977...

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VMware ESX 4.1, Patch Release ESX410-201201001 VMware ESX 4.1 Patch ESX410-201201401-SG: Updates VMkernel, CIM, Tools, and others VMware ESXi 4.1, Patch Release ESXi410-201201001 VMware ESX 4.1 Patch...

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As business critical applications move into production virtualized environments, the need arises to ensure their performance from a response time perspective. Legacy Applications Performance Management tools are in many cases not well suited to make the jump from static physical systems, to dynamic…

I started attending technical user groups around about four years ago, intially with the UK PowerShell User Group and swiftly after the London VMware User Group. These are the main two groups I have stuck with in that time, but have also sampled others such as Windows Server, AD and Exchange user…

HP has released new Virtual Connect Flex-10 firmware 3.51 and marked it as a *RECOMMENDED* update. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3201263&prodNameId=3201264&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-…

When a customer is deploying a Vblock Infrastructure Platform with VMware View or VMware vCloud Director, there is a consistent message that always arises, where do they run the virtual management infrastructure stack? View and vCloud come up on a regular basis, but this article focuses on any…

Are you still excited about SAOP and Rest plug-ins? Another powerful plug-in has already come on the stage! The VMware vCenter Orchestrator SQL plug-in provides fast and straightforward way to perform basic database operations like insert, select, update and delete of table records. Let's learn more…

I have been trying to export some VMs from my home lab to my public cloud provider, however when I tried to select a cloud I received the error that the vCloud Connector Node was not available.  After logging into the vCloud Connector server, I could see both nodes were down. I had enabled the…

VMware has released vCenter Operations Management 5 The product has been announced and released already few days ago, but I was quite busy with my VCP preparation and studies, so I haven’t been able to cover this release yet. Now when I passed my VCP 510 (you can read my experience on this…

VMworld Europe 2012 in Barcelona - Pre Registration is open - don´t miss it..... http://www.vmwareemeablog.com/uk/save-the-date-vmworld-europe-2012-9th-11th-october-barcelona

[Updated with vSphere HA clarifications] This was an interesting question that came my way recently. One of our storage partners wanted to ensure that a VMFS volume was completely quiesced (no activity) and was interested to know what could possibly be the cause of writes to the VMFS volume when all…

I’ve been meaning to write this post since May 2010! Never got around to it but I am starting to see and hear about it again. The costs of Windows Server systems become important if you are renewing licenses or …

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As I tweeted last week, there would be a big announcement when the open source VI Java API gets 20,000 downloads. It hit target yesterday. To celebrate it, I decide to release the code generator for the API, which William (@lamw) rated as “awesome.” If you have used Onyx for generating PowerCLI…

Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later, this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script. 

…

Seems that the date of the VMworld Europe 2012 has changed, from the usual second half of October (see also the original date on the photo in this post).

On the official VMworld site there is a new week (still officially from Tuesday to Thursday):

Read more on VMworld Europe 2012 – New dates for…

As many of you may know, Eric Siebert over at vSphere Land holds an annual vote to determine the top blogs in the world of virtualization. He then lists the "Top 25" blogs in a special section in his vLaunchpad which is a page where he links to all the blogs on his radar in the virtualization…

Even before I left VMware for EMC I was being asked to comment on “thin on thin”: the use of VMware thin VMDKs on virtually/thin provisioned storage.  As a VMware employee I recommended VMware’s thin provisioning but referred to storage vendors for their own best practices. Now, as a member…

Yesterday VMware announced that it will be supporting RAID 5 and 6 with their Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). With the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released their VSA, a shared storage solution for the SMB market. VMware VSA uses the local storage in each ESXi server, presents it to the VSA…

To simplify and streamline product portfolio, VMware has decided that the vCenter Operations Suite replaces vCenter CapacityIQ and vCenter CapacityIQ as a standalone product will be discontinued from  January 24, 2012.

Read more on End of Availability for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ…

The EMC VNX and VMware vSphere Techbook (this the reference text for any customers/partners/EMCers who use EMC VNX arrays with vSphere – which translates to a LOT of people) has been updated! It is downloadable – so click the link...

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware I recently saw a question asking if vCloud Director was supported with vCenter Foundation. This version is intended for use in small environments, and is limited to being able to manage three vSphere hosts. It’s a good question, as…

With the introduction of vSphere 5.0, ESX has been discontinued. ESXi is now the only version available for datacenter server virtualization. Due to the architectural changes from ESX to ESXi, not all configuration files, settings, and third party tools are guaranteed to be migrated to ESXi 5.0.…

Tim Mangan has released another great tool called Launch Time Analyze. The purpose of this tool is to act as an automated command launcher, which will repeatedly run a test while measuring the amount of time it takes to complete the test. This tool helps gauge end user "perceived performance", or…

Tim Mangan has released another great tool called Launch Time Analyze. The purpose of this tool is to act as an automated command launcher, which will repeatedly run a test while measuring the amount of time it takes to complete the test. This tool helps gauge end user "perceived performance", or…

PowerCLI is a PowerShell snap-in that allows you to perform advanced scripting against either vCenter or individual vSphere hosts.  Let’s assume that you have Microsoft PowerShell installed on a Windows system and you have downloaded and installed the latest version of VMware’s PowerCLI snap-in…

The roster of VMware View customer references keeps growing. I though I would share some of the recent ones so that other customers and prospects could learn how other companies are deploying View 5.0 and what sets View apart from the competition: simplicity, scalability, integration with the…

TrainSignal has released a new VMware View 5 training course!  Called VMware View 5 Essentials Training, “This course teaches a virtualization starter how to use VMware View 5.0 to set up a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Virtualization experts Brian Knudtson and Lane Leverett guide you…

At the moment I’m working through the typo corrections for the second pressing of the SRM 5.0 book. In the main these are little corrections in the text. But occasionally, I come across something a little bit more major. You would not believe how much work goes into the review process – but even…

This is a tool I've been using almost daily in my current project and for the past few months. Now It's finally been released to the public! The tool has been created by Chuck Hirtsius – one of the EUC Specialist's within VMware.  The release you see here today is the first release of the [...]

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With the release of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, comes a new technology called Server App-V. Server App-V is a technology that enables the virtualization of server applications, removing the dependency of a server application in a specific Windows Server instance (whether…

Posted in Cloud ComputingCloud SecurityPlatform as a Service (PaaS)Software as a Service (SaaS)Software Defined Networking

My friend and skilled raconteur Chris Swan (@cpswan) wrote an excellent piece a few days ago titled “Building security in – the audit paradox.” This thoughtful piece was…

Andrew Morgan has released a cool free tool that allows you to turn your old hardware into usable Citrix thin clients. This product is called ThinKiosk and is a "...lightweight .Net framework application designed to replace the shell of the PC it runs on. ThinKiosk is a secure browser window that is…

VMturbo has released Operations Manager 3.0 New major upgrade to VMturbo’s flagship product has just been released with XenServer and vCloud Director support. In previous release of VMturbo’s product the VMware vSphere and Hyper-V has been supported already. The product licensing suite stays as…

VMware has just released new patches for vSphere 4.1. Detailed information regarding resolved and known issues and enhancements can be found at:

• http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2009080
• http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2009137

VMware ESX 4.1 Patch is available for download at http://www.vmware.com/patch/download/…

You're all familiar with the VMware Knowledgebase, but do you know what a Resolution Path KB is? Well, it's a very special kind of KB article, and we've incorporated Mind Maps into them too, but more on that in a...

I haven’t seen anyone reporting this yet, even the scoopmeister Eric Sloof has posted this. I just heard (thanks for the anonymous tip) that the date has changed for VMworld Europe! Don’t miss VMworld 2012! Barcelona October 9-11 Learn about the latest virtualization technologies and strategies…

I was thinking today about a number of things that really annoy me about the overall user experience of browsing the Internet on a mobile device. (For the record, I use mobile Safari.) And before you think that I’m going to go all Andy Rooney on you (“You know what I don’t like [...]

One of the best features of vCenter Operations is its ability to create dynamic thresholds.  Based on the dynamic thresholds vCenter Operations will determine when your anomaly noise line has been crossed and fire off a ‘Smart Alert’.   This … Continue reading →

As usual this post is born of a real situation encountered in our VMware infrastructure.
We were trialing a new storage array with SSD and decided to configure swap files for the test VMs to be located on the SSD backed array - great, if they actually end up swapping (should never happen, but lets…

As most of you have noticed by now I am a heavy user of Social Media (Twitter, Google +, Facebook). VMware acquired, and is working on, some very interesting products which all have a common theme: Enterprise Collaboration. In this post I want to give an overview of products that I’m using and are…

This is meant to be a very short post about the importance of vCenter Managed Object References with vCloud Director.  In the past folks have heard David Hill and I talk about the vCloud Eco-System and how vCenter is pretty much in the middle of the universe for many things.  Today a lot of [...]

I and others look at Virtualization Security constructs with an eye towards Cloud Security, but they are not necessarily the same. Granted for some clouds, virtualization security can lead to cloud security but this really depends on how the cloud's architecture. Even so, what we know from…

Greetings KBTV fans! Today we have a new video tutorial for you. This video will demonstrate how to manually uninstall VMware Fusion 4...not that you would ever want to do something like that...why would you want to uninstall something as...

Need to configure email notifications on vCenter alarms? This PowerCLI automation script will save you valuable time and configure the alarms for you Related posts:

1. A new PowerCLI release and a New Year’s feature
2. PowerCLI: Disable/Enable HA and DRS
3. Managing VMware DRS rules using PowerCLI

Brand new Advisory regarding Third party updates,  Synopsis: VMware ESXi and ESX updates to third party library and ESX Service Console Issue date: 2012-01-30 Updated on: 2012-01-30 (initial advisory) CVE numbers   — COS Kernel — CVE-2011-0726, CVE-2011-1078, CVE-2011-1079, CVE-2011-1080, CVE-…

Just a couple of advisories today,  it’s been quiet in Palo Alto recently regarding these, but today we have a new one and this one which is a third time appearance for this particular update.  This is quite a complex advisory with a lot going on in it, it covers a potential DOS in the [...]

A recent post in the vSphere forums asked what seems to be a simple question: How can I measure how long it takes to boot a virtual machine? I believe that the poster was attempting to find out if there is a performance stat that can be used for this purpose.  However, it brings up a bigger ques. …

There are two critical steps to complete before you get started. Make sure you configure PowerShell to allow remote script execution. set-executionpolicyremotesigned Connect to your vCenter server or to an individual ESX/ESXi host. more...

vSphere 5 brought new filesystem VMFS 5 – your questions about it? Yesterday I took the VCP 510 exam. I passed fine, and I updated the post - Resources to prepare your VCP exam – VCP 510 – with my own experience there. And sure, there has been questions about the new VMFS 5 – new version…

A little while ago I posted an article outlining a design that provides a solution for Scalability and High Availability for the vSphere Web Client in vSphere 5 for enterprise environments. Many of these enterprise environments that might want scalability for the vSphere Web Client may also be…

If you’ve been contemplating whether to deploy VSA within your IT environment, we have exciting news for you—VSA now supports RAID 5 & 6! Since launching VSA with RAID 10 this past August, we have received customer requests for supporting RAID 5 & 6. Your feedback is always important to...

The date for VMworld Europe is now final. The 2012 edition will take place from Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 October in Barcelona. San Francisco August 27-30 Barcelona October 9-11 The event in Copenhagen last year was a great success. There were more than 200 breakout sessions, over 20 hands-on labs…

More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website page where you can…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants our public clouds to be more private and secure.

Private clouds are not always clearly defined.

HP Storage will be hosting a tweetup at the VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) Conference on February 12 from 8-10 PM.  If you're coming to PEX, read the blog post to get the details and join us for the VMware PEX Unofficial official Community Tweetup!

Gabe wrote about how HTML5 clients work almost a year ago , and he mentioned Ericom's HTML5 client in his review of his Chromebook . Put simply, Ericom AccessNow is an HTML5 client for using remote desktops through web browsers. The client is "installed...(read more)<img><img>

I saw recently posted on Twitter that VMware will be releasing a vCloud Director certification. http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/01/vcloud-director-certification.html

Initial comments seemed to be mixed, including a comment about how this seemed pointless. I do not wholly disagree with this…

Being a SafariBooksOnline subscriber was a tough choice for me initially even though it was part of my desire to go all digital as I describe in a previous post. My primary hesitation was whether or not I’d actually use it enough to justify the cost. Well, I’m several months in and I’d say…

The Dell KACE K2000 is a client OS deployment appliance that supports both Mac OS and Windows OS images. The KACE K2000 comes as 1U rack-mounted server or in a VMware virtual machine (VK2000). It runs, as also the K1000 appliance, a version of the BSD OS… for this reason the virtual appliance…

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware Recently, the question came up if VMware was planning to develop a certification around vCloud Director. Yes, we are indeed! As there is still a fair amount of work being done on this front, it would be a bit pre-mature to go into details…

This will come as no surprise to a lot of you, but I feel it’s worth underlining: virtualization covers the entire stack in the data center. This can easily be proven by looking at the vSphere Client. All four food groups are shown: compute, OS, storage, and networking. I’ve spent a lot of time…

      Nexus VDI Kung Fu 2012 Citrix (HDX) versus to VMware PCoIP tested with Login VSI How to give Win Server 2K8 R2 a Win7 Look & Feel in VMware View VDI Paging Files – Big? Small? Or None At All? (The SLOG) Breaking down OnLive Desktop: Why this is not the desktop [...]

September,2011 I launched a community program called “The VDI Read/Write Ratio Challenge”. The objective of the program was to identify the real production IOPS baseline for VDI deployments. Thank you all of you who contributed to with your numbers! Unfortunately we are still short on data with…

Azure experts can make the big bucks. That's the claim of Dice.com's annual salary survey of IT jobs.

As you may know, Hyper-V 3 includes a lot of new networking capabilities.  Here, I’m going to discuss a few of the new features you’ll find in virtual machine configurations in Hyper-V 3. more...

Today I ran into an article which had an interesting quote;  Persona Management isn’t mature enough yet, and VMware knows it, Dunkin’s Brennan said. The company probably added it just to “check the box”, but he speculated that VMware would … Continue reading →

When designing a VMware View environment there are many things you must plan in order to find the right solution. The most important factor in regards to performance seems to be disk io.

During the past few years the server vendors (IBM, HP, Dell) have adapted their own storage systems. Earlier they…

By Leah Schoeb, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware Power Saving turned on in the server BIOS has been the cause of many performance issues reported in vSphere 4.1. In fact it has been the #1 resolution to performance problems reported in the past few months. It has masked itself as performance…

Tech professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to a report released by Dice last week, but cloud and virtualization skills were not among the most fortunate. After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary…

By Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage

I’m in the midst of the ongoing remodel of my 1910 brick bungalow.  While I love the house and all the character that comes with a historical home, I’m constantly challenged with sloping walls, decaying mortar and strange…

<img>This is the first and only official guide to VMware's new VCP510 (VCP 5) exam. Organized to follow VMware's newest exam blueprint, it's also designed from the ground up to be both engaging and enjoyable. Author Bill Ferguson acts like a "study buddy," encouraging virtualization…

Now that we officially announced our overall 2011 results, I can commend on last year VMware View performance . Q4 2011 was another record breaking quarter for VMware View finishing a great year for desktop virtualization at VMware and our customers. This success was driven by more customer…

There are different course requirements, costs and objectives for each level of VMware certifications, so it?s best to do your homework before taking the VCP exam or others.

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Previously, I discussed why I felt that blocking social media led to users realizing that, via smartphones, they could easily circumvent IT and Security controls - which lead to a substantial amount of business value being stored (unofficially) on consumer SaaS solutions.  The solution is both…

by Kyle Gleed, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware A common problem I come across when helping customers implement Auto Deploy is they PXE boot their hosts and instead of seeing the Auto Deploy server install ESXi they get an error complaining that the server was unable to find a valid image…

In today's post, Eric Siebert discusses I/O storage bottlenecks, perhaps the most vulnerable part of a VM in terms of potential performance loss. Eric demonstrates how to use vCenter Server and exstop to troubleshoot and solve any I/O bottlenecks but also suggests looking at other 3rd party options…

This is the first part of the PCoIP Trilogy that I will be working on over the coming weeks. In this part I am looking at how to troubleshoot PCoIP issues using the new PCoIP Log Viewer. I'll take you step-by-step through the PCoIP log information, explaining what each counter means. I have also…

VMware's latest move to help accelerate private cloud adoption came last week with the official announcement of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0.

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VMware is collecting feedback this week on the topic of the vSphere Hypervisor (no cost ESXi that you download at VMware.com). If you use or have evaluated the product please take our short survey located here. Our survey will close this Friday (2/3). If you have already participated, thank you for…

VMware Zimbra for Android (VZA) has been around for a while but it’s not known that well.  It is an email client for Android devices which supports Zimbra backends. At this moment the VZA is a “fling”; a client to … Continue reading →

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, service provider…

Starwind’s Hyper-V backup plug-in to backup/recovery VMs in Hyper-V environments. This webminar is organized by Starwind Software this Thursday. In case you’re planning to run, or you’re already running Hyper-V in your environment, you might be interested in backup solutions. Starwind…

A few weeks ago the EMC Solutions group released their Virtual Storage Integrator version 5.1 (VSI).  For those EMC+VMware customers that read my blog, and are not familiar with the VSI it’s the framework that EMC uses to write the various EMC+VMware plugins we offer to our joint customers. …

If you are a London VMware User Group attendee, you’ll already be aware of the fantastic quality of presenters we have had from the community over the last few years. As such, we wanted a way to reward those that have spent many hours of their own personal time honing their content. I know from…

Thanks to Scott Lowe for dropping some science on us on the last Brownbag. The video is available on professionalvmware.com, and should be available in the RSS feed and on iTunes.

Posted by Anne Catambay Director,Global Outbound Alliance Marketing That’s the rating I give to our newly launched VMware® Solution Exchange (VSX). Why? Because it’s an on-ramp that gives you the opportunity to discover, evaluate and expedite the buying process for virtualization and cloud…

It seems every release of the VMware vSphere vCenter server service has more dependency on SSL.  I always replace the default self signed SSL certificates with ones created from an internal/trusted certificate authority.  There is a good four part guide to creating the properly formatted…

I have now successfully migrated my blog site to a vCloud hosting provider, essentially Eating my own dog food. Practicing what I preach. Virtacore are providing the hosting through there vCloud Express Public Cloud offering. They provide there own portal to interface with vCloud Director and I must…

This Wednesday February 1st 2012, Jason Boche (web/twitter) will be presenting Section 4 (VMs and vApps) of the VMware VCP 5 blueprint. Jason is a long time friend of the show, having presented a number of times and actively participating in the webinars as his schedule allows. I’m [...]

If during a Veeam B&R job using Hot Add mode you receive an error like this:

Processing the VM in Backup/Replica job in Virtual Appliance (hot-add) mode fails with the following error message:

“Backing up object “[XXX_SXN] DXX-SXX2-TXX/DXX-SXX2-TXX.vmdk”

BackupDiskFull failed

Client error:…

If you are in the Minneapolis, MN area – please come and join us on February 29th for our VDI Kung Fu event.  There will be free food, free training, and a great opportunity for networking.  We have a number of VDI rockstars that will be presenting including: Andre Leibovici,…

Having passed the VCP5 exam last week, I thought I would write the obligatory study resources blog post. So below are the resources I found most useful in preparing for the exam: 1) TrainSignal VMware vSphere 5 Training I’ve previously used the TrainSignal VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package to…

VMware ESX High disk latency observed on Dell MD3000i storage array (2004576) Date Published: 1/27/2012 VMware Tools using approximately 15% CPU after upgrading to ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 (2010732) Date Published: 1/26/2012 Attempting to add a host to the switch...

Last Week one of our colleagues asked the VMware team if we could provide him with all Hosts and VM’s that had access to a couple of DMZ VLAN’s. Most of the time that’s not really a problem, just use a script and select the right VLAN’s, right? In a single vSphere environment, maybe! But…

Here is a new free video from the New VMware View 5 training course released by Trainsignal. In this video, Brian Knudston will show you How to deploy personalized virtual desktops in VMware View 5. This new training has been released just last week and I already reported on that in this article…

RES is joining a crowded party of file sharing solutions but they bring a cloud pricing license structure to a on-premise file sharing solution. The RES Hyperdrive solution can span a range of end-devices be they VDI, desktop or a hybrid and at an interesting price point. With clients for PC, Mac,…

The next article from our HP Tech Day in Ft. Collins includes notes from the HP 3PAR session and the file-based family overview.  Along with notes taken during the session are embedded videos courtesy of Jeffery Powers (www.geekazine.com)

The KACE Management Appliance delivers a fully integrated systems management solution, unlike traditional software approaches that can require complex and time-consuming deployment and maintenance. KACE accomplishes this via an extremely flexible, intelligent appliance-based architecture that…

[Note: Somehow I missed posting this after the video was available, but for the sake of continuity, here it is.] Huge thanks to vExpert Shane Williford (twitter) for coming on the Brownbag podcast and presenting section 3 of the VMware VCP 5 blueprint. As always, the video can be [...]

I've a new sponsor for my blog: it's Digeus Inc. that develops plenty of applications for different usagesI've been asked to try out the SnapIT Screen Capture (current release 3.7).The application is easy to use screen capture software which allows you to easily capture anything on the screen…

I got an interesting question from one of my co-authors of the PowerCLI Reference book. He was looking for a method to find the port used by a VM when connected to a portgroup on a dvSwitch. Finding the answer to that question is not too difficult, once you know which property holds the value. [...]

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, VMware. Currently multiple white papers are going through formatting / editing and these will be published in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully I can provide an update on that soon. For now, check out these blog posts. Also don't forget to vote for your favorite…

RT @Texiwill THank you Mr. Laverick, just received a nice book on SRM 5 <- Its a good read. Nice work Mike. # Back home again after another successful SRM on IBM SVC deployment. #DRRules # Powered by Twitter Tools Related Posts: Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates Weekly Twitter Updates…

While installing and configuring vCloud Director recently, I kept thinking how to simplify it by removing un-necessary concepts and steps. To be fair, vCloud Director as of version 1.5 does a decent job to provide a high level abstraction for cloud infrastructure. Still it can be significantly…

I am very happy to announce that I’ve taken a new job with Splunk! I’m going to be a Solutions Architect working in their Business Development Partner Application Development team for my buddy Brandon Shell. As a part of my new role, I will be using Python (and PowerShell wherever I can fit it…

Long at last, the follow-up post. Sorry it took so long this time, I was traveling and on a crummy connection, and then well, family first. That said, to the folks in the BrownBag family, here is the VCP5 Objective 2, Networking BrownBag video featuring Scott Lowe (blog) along side our own Damian…

It’s been over a year since the last poll was held to determine which were the top 10 virtualisation blogs on the internet. At the time this one was written only by me and wasn’t even registered with vsphere-land.com for the vote. A lot can change in 12 months. Jeremy now co-authors the blog…

The Microsoft Security Essentials is free for use on genuine Windows systems. The Microsoft Security Essentials is free anti malware software which can be found on this page here. As said it’s free if runs on genuine system. As I was pleasantly surprised that the soft is quite lightweight, getting…

Near "real-time" summary of this morning's first two sessions:

Welcome all to HP Storage Tech Days, Day 1 kicking off right now. The crowd awaits in hushed expectancy in this giant amphitheatre … well actually it’s a conference room in Building 6 of the HP campus in beautiful Fort Collins,…

HP started in data protection 30 years ago, first customer was IBM! We started later than competitors, which can be good because you get a better perspective. HP focused on three attributes:

• Data deduplication
• Sparse Index; ie, the ability to store a small portion of cache in memory. Gave the…

One way to try desktop virtualization is by running Citrix XenDesktop on VMware vSphere. Explore XenApp on VMware, too.

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One of my several motivations for this blog was to debunk myths that served as barriers to the adoption of virtualization.  EVERY time I was given the opportunity to move beyond fears and demonstrate what could be done with virtualization, it was a complete success, and several would say “I…

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure…

Posted by Gina Bollenback, Global Alliance Marketing Communications Manager This week’s roundup highlights events coming up next week and new resources available to make your life easier: Who to Follow for FlexPod at Cisco Live 2012 London (FlexPod) If you’re attending or trying to keep up with…

By Karl Robinson, Sales Director at StratoGen Despite the economic gloom on both sides of the Atlantic, 2012 is shaping up to be a bumper year for those involved in the VMware hosting business. Whilst it’s true that most IT managers are under budgetary constraints, the majority have realized that…

If you have HP BL 460 G7′s with the on-board 10GB CNA, you’re going to want to read this post regarding a problem with the latest firmware. This was first noticed this issue when updating firmware to troubleshoot an issue where the storage doesn’t come back up after rebooting an upstream Nexus…

In my day job, my primary role is to meet with customers to discuss the subject of IT Transformation, aka “organizational change”, as it pertains to moving from a traditional silo IT structure to one better positioned for IT as a Service (ITaaS). For better or worse, depending on [...]

New Training for VMware View 5 by Trainsignal. After VMware Education official trainiNewng, other, self paced training courses starting to appear. Like the new training done by Trainsignal. As an Instructors –  Brian Knudston and Lane Leverett. You might know Brian Knudston already since I’ve…

Step back to Citrix CEO Mark Templeton's keynote at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco and you would have heard him talk of "The Three Cs - the Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Personal Cloud." Hang on a moment, "Personal Cloud" what's that? For years Citrix used to talk about "any any any" and it did…

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to not only attend the London VMware user Group but actually present. The day started pretty early and due to traffic I arrived half an hour late to the welcome and introduction from Alaric Davies so snuck into the back to not disturb and t allow me to have one [...]

    Today’s meetup was the first London VMUG that I have attended. In the past they have unfortunately landed up on days where work commitments took precedence. Running a few minutes late due to a long walk from Bank Underground Station to the venue, I arrived (to my luck) to find that the…

It’s officially time to vote for your favorite virtualization blog. Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com has opened voting again on his annual Top 50 VMware & virtualization blogs. This time last year was the first time my blog appeared on the list and I didn’t do too bad coming in at #59. I’m…

by Neal Mueller Not every Oracle support agent got the “memo” that Oracle supports their database and applications being virtualized on VMware vSphere. Fact is, Oracle has an official support policy for virtualization on VMware vSphere, articulated in MyOracleSupport Document ID #249212.1. The…

Well, I think it's finally time to do a blog post. I have been really busy with a couple of projects and preparation for VMware Partner Exchange next month, but those responsibilities are starting to wind down. The fruits of my labor will be publicly released or presented in the coming months, then…

vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) is a set of features and primitives designed to enable vSphere to offload storage functionality to underlying intelligent storage arrays, reducing network bandwidth, and increasing the overall performance of the process by up to 10x. Traditionally, this was…

Over the last year there has been an acceleration in the deployments of virtual desktops in our customer base. As a result, we keep getting more and more customers willing to talk publicly about their experience with VMware View. We are very proud to add ADP to our list of prestigious customer…

Posted in Cloud Computing

I read a very interesting article from ZDNet UK this morning titled “Amazon Cuts Off Stack at the PaaS” The gist of the article is that according to Werner Vogels (@werner,) AWS’ CTO, they have no intention of delivering a … #LINK#

I’ve been working with VMware View Local Mode for couple of weeks now and I wanted to share my experience. VMware View Local Mode allows a virtual desktop to be downloaded to a laptop or desktop and to be executed ...

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VMware vCenter Server allows you to centrally manage hosts from either a physical or virtual Windows machine, and enables the use of advanced features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage vMotion, and vSphere Auto…

...the Error: Exception Thrown while executing SQL scriptfrom VMware knowledge base:SymptomsCannot upgrade from vCenter Server 4.1 to 5.0 Upgrading from vCenter Server 4.1 to 5.0 fails You see this error: Exception Thrown while executing SQL script In the %temp%\VCDatabaseUpgrade.txt log file, you…

Most folks think that because they have access to more than one cloud in vCloud Express, or any other cloud provider for that matter, you automatically get disaster recovery.  In doing past articles on how to transform your blog into a vCloud Express based setup on Bitnami, I discovered a few…

The Dell EqualLogic team has officially announced the release of Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) v4.0, now available for download.

The EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) tightly integrate the EqualLogic PS Series arrays with Microsoft host operating…

We just started our HP Tech Day and thanks to Jeffery Powers (@geekazine, www.geekazine.com) we are streaming live.  Here's a rough schedule of what we'll be doing but I'd suggest watching Twitter and our event hashtag #HPTechDay to know when we're streaming.

• Now! Converged Storage introduction…

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 gives customers advanced features, but the price tag has some customers eyeing less expensive options from VKernel and Microsoft.

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Last 18th January we had our first Italian VMUG Hands On Day.

We hosted ExaGrid, US company who realize and sells disk backup appliances. The event went really well, we had 16 attendees, all of them extremely satisfied. I think is a good number, thinking about the extreme specificity; I’ve been to…

One of my favorite parts of my job is the regular need to gather and conform data. Actually it can be a real pain sometimes but it’s usually an interesting challenge. I came across this issue several months ago when trying to generate a function that would format the data output so that it could…

Jeff Miller was using VMware View 5 with Wyse p20’s and needed the ability for users to disconnect from their desktop rather than just locking their machine and turning off the monitor/device.   He was running into issues specifically with View 5 and the P20s reconnecting back to sessions that…

This is another great edition of The Virtual Boardroom, and today’s post will feature Oded Kedem, CTO and Co-founder of Zerto. Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. Zerto provides large enterprises…

My post on vCloud Director Allocations Models back in September 2010 has always done fairly well in terms of view/visits. Lately I have been receiving some offline questions about how valid this article still is with vCloud Director 1.5 so I decided to go through the same exercise here. Instead of…

So – on Jan 24th – EMC announced our Q4 2011 financial results, and our 2012 outlook. This isn’t the place for financial analysis (and I’m no financial analyst), EMC killed it. It all starts with our customers, and our...

Posted by Steve Herrod Chief Technology Officer It has been nine months since we launched Cloud FoundryTM - the industry’s first open platform as a service (aka PaaS). Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open...

I mentioned in my last post that I have started the process of preparing for my VCP5 exam that I need to have finished by the end of February. While I was watching the Trainsignal training video about installing and configuring vCenter, I got to thinking about how much vCenter had changed and…

Although this is documented on page 59 of the excellent Evaluators Guide I figured it wouldn’t hurt to write a tiny blog post. I found myself googling for it multiple times already with no succes, so there must be more people facing that “problem”. Below you can find the passwords of the…

While working on the ESXi shell you might notice that the “date” command returns the UTC time instead of displaying the correct time zone like ESX Classic does. This is by design within ESXi and stated in this VMware KB article: ESXi uses UTC time and does not support changing time zones…

The popularity and fun I’ve been having with creating pseudo #powershell scripts has started to spread. Not only am I writing more of them every day but I’m seeing many others as well. Recently Cody Bunch and I spat a few back and forth and it looks like we’ve settled on the Twitter hashtag of…

Customer deleted a datastore, but ESXi still tries to access it, creating an APD condition. Here's the way to undo the mess.

Cloud storage company manages to increase bookings tenfold by refocusing on enterprise sales.

vCenter Operations 5.0 overview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DJuTiqKag   Install and configure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwRdGDhI0lc Filed under: CapacityIQ, Compliance, Monitoring, vCenter Operations, VMware Tagged: vCenter Operations, VMware

VMware Professional Services has helped the Palo Alto Medical Foundation virtualize; leading to controlled datacenter growth, $3+ million in ROI, and improved availability and reliability. Read the Case Study here “Application vendors understand that this has become a standard for datacenters and…

<img> Eric Siebert over at vSphere-land is running a new blog contest which let you decide who the most favorite VMware blogger is. You can pick your 10 most popular bloggers; based on your points Eric Siebert will create a vSphere-land blogger top 25. Please cast your vote and make a chance…

First off, today we released vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite together with...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a beta of their cloud storage gateway for accessing S3 EC2 and EBS resources, here are my initial impressions

I was looking how to customize the Windows 2K8 Server R2 that I am accessing via PCoIP and VMware View to give the Windows 7 look and feel. Read my article. How to Access Windows 2K8 Server via PCoIP with VMware View. I found an excellent resource that I would like to share here. The [...]

I installed the new vCenter Operations Manager 5 about an hour ago. Whoa. I had the pleasure of meeting Kit Colbert, Praveen Kannan, and Martin Klaus last April when they were in town, and I know they, and the rest of the team, have been doing a lot of work on the product. It really [...]

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Did you…

Today while taking a break from writing some project related IP, I kicked over to my home lab rebuild that was pretty much stalled in lieu of the other things I have running around these days.  While I was waiting for some things to update I decided to take a look at one of the free tools the…

A fellow VCI who was teaching the vSphere 5 What's New training course got a question from a student asking what happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down, because with vSphere 5.0 all the setting for resource pools are "moved" to vCenter.

Andy Cary who works as a Senior Technical Trainer at…

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area…

Join Hemant Gaidhani in a video walkthrough of the installation and configuration of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

I just received in the mail from VMware a package with two brand-new super-cool posters inside. They sent me the new PowerCLI 5.0 poster and (one I have never seen before) the VMware ESXi 5 Reference poster. I created the video below to show you what they look like and say thanks to great people…

Desktop virtualization and BYOD go hand-in-hand. But both are cultural changes and VMware View has its share of challenges, starting with the profile management feature.

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The delivery of vCenter Operations 5.0 to the market by VMware represents several important milestones in Operations Management for virtualized environments. The tight integration with vSphere and the integration of the Integrien analytics with real time configuration change detection and…

Hey readers, I’m on the ballot for the top 25 virtualization blogs this year. If you are a virtualization person (and who isn’t these days) would you go to http://vote.vsphere-land.com/ and vote for the blogs you read? It takes about a minute, tops. This blog is “The Lone Sysadmin (Bob…

vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins from VMware and partners like Infoblox, Radware and EMC/VCE are now available on new VMware Solution Exchange marketplace.

It’s that time again for the vSphere-Land.com (Eric Siebert’s) Top Blogs voting to begin. This year their are also special categories to distinguish certain types of blog. The vote should be judged on the following criteria. Longevity – Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time &…

While browsing the VMTN forums the other day, I just learned that you can sign your own OVF files using VMware's ovftool. To sign your OVF files, you will need the .ovf, .vmdk files and an X.509 certificate. Though not mandatory, you should also have a manifest file that includes a hash of the files…

On Feb. 13-16, VMware PEX 2012 will be on its way in Las Vegas. This being my first experience with...

When going to deploy a VMware vSphere OVA based vApp package you may receive the following vague error message: “The OVF package is invalid and cannot be deployed” along with “The operation is not supported on the object”.  The latter part of this error message is the message which is more…

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VMware Opens the VMware Solution Exchange, an Online Virtualization and Cloud Solutions Marketplace for Partners. Read the release here, and visit the VSX here. This post brought to you by...

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It is that time of the year again, the last voting was over a year ago where we made it, thanks to you!, to the 13th place. Voting is now open again for the top VMware & virtualization blogs.  It would be nice and a great honor to get us in the Top 10 this [...]

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Posted by Jay Workman Director, HP Alliance Marketing VMware and HP Drive Virtualized SAP Landscapes into the Mainstream With VMware and HP virtualization solutions, your SAP solutions-based development, test, training, and production landscapes can cost less and be more productive than within a…

You know… it’s that time of week again. The time of week where you will do the most awesome, career advancing, personal enrichment, raise producing thing you do all week. That is, you will come join VMware expert Scott Lowe (twitter / blog) as we cover section 2, vSphere Networking, on the VCP…

Every year – Eric Siebert at vSphere-land does the authoritative survey amongst the VMware cognoscenti re: the best blogs out there. You can see the 2011 results here. Voting runs until 2/7 – so vote now! (click on the button...

vCenter 5.0 Operations Management Suite is now live on vmware.com! GA Date: 01/24/2012 http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_operations/5_0 Evaluation: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=vcenter-ops5&lp=default Documentation:…

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite has been released today. This was the major announcement and focus of VMworld Europe 2011 which was billed as “The Biggest VMware Management Launch Ever”. To recap, the new vCenter Operations Management Suite is made up of two major components: vCenter…

At VMworld Europe last October we announced three new suites for operations management, application management and IT business management. Together, these three management suites deliver on our vision to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era. Check out this video of VMware CTO Steve…

The more we talk to our customers the more we hear that they are focused on two major tasks in 2012. The first is to extend their virtualization footprint by virtualizing more of their business critical applications (e.g., Exchange, CRM, etc.). The second is to accelerate their implementation of…

We're excited to have been nominated in several categories of the VSPHERE-LAND annual "best of" survey:

• Best Virtualization Blog
• Best Cloud Computing Blog
• Best New Blog in 2011
• Best Podcast

We love being able to do the podcast each week - meeting new people, learning from the experts…

PowerShell is a great language, I am often amazed at how far it can actually reach and what you can gather data, write data or use data from. Mainly I use PowerShell to manage my VMware environment but last night I broke from my comfort zone and took some time to see what I was [...]

Using PowerShell…

For the past few months I have been spending a lot of time looking at the performance of Large VDI environments, where the problems lay and where performance can be improved. When designing VDI environments, a couple of things that you should consider are the .vswp file and the GuestOS paging file.…

Bilal Hashmi wrote a nice article about HA today and in this article he asked a couple of questions. As I think the info is useful for everyone I decided to respond through a blog article instead of by commenting. Let me start by saying that in general HA should never be disabled. The later versions…

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VMware Solution Exchange (VSX) Enables Customers to Discover, Evaluate and Expedite Buying Process for Joint Solutions through Direct Engagement with Partners and Developers. This are important news for vCenter Orchestrator. Here is what these involve:

• vSphere customers will now find all the…

Join Kit Colbert in a walkthrough oveview of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. These are the new Features of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Editions.

New Operations Management Dashboard provides comprehensive views into health,…

Some photos and comments on a recent day trip to record a video in Boston that involved time above real clouds.

If you’ve been managing a virtual environment for any period of time you’ve probably received this email:

Josh,

Next week we plan to do an upgrade for XXX application and would like a clone of the following servers to kick off the upgrade window.

• bigapp-db
• bigapp-web01
• bigapp-web02
• bigapp-web03
• …

Infrastructor Navigator has been released and can be found here.  Rather than go thru the details, I’ll repost the features from the release notes: VMware vCenter™ Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of…

The enterprise and standard editions of Operations Manager have been updated to v5 and can be downloaded here.  There’s not really a What’s new in the release notes, but rather a high-level summary of the features as so: VMware vCenter Operations Manager is an automated operations management…

  In the last post [Part 1/2], we prepared our VSA, created a management group and cluster in the CMC, and then initialized our disks. Next up, we’ll be creating a Volume which will be presented to our ESXi hosts as an iSCSI LUN. Before we do this though, we need to make sure our [...]

Did you ever want to access Windows 2K8 Servers within VMware View using PCoIP? This configuration is not supported by VMware, only Terminal Services. Below you will find a step-by-step guide on how to connect Windows 2k8 R2 servers to VMware View using PCoIP. The use cases for this type of…

Its time for voting for top blogs in different categories at @ericsiebert site vsphere-land including server virtualization, cloud, storage, networking andmore

It seems like only yesterday when the last survey was conducted, and I was actually not going to write this post – because I hate “me too” posts.

So let us try and do this slightly differently.

On my No. 32 - Thank you all so much! post I stated some observations – which I hope you will…

This quick start video provides a simplified, step-by-step set of instructions for creating a new virtual machine on the StratoGen vCloud platform. The StratoGen vCloud platform is built upon VMware vCloud Director 1.5. This video is a supplement to the vCloud director 1.5 user manual which…

Once again my colleague at HP Eric Seabert (@ericsiebert) has opened up the polls to elect the Top VMware and Virtualization blogs. This year yours truly is lucky enough to be on the list of candidates so if you feel that my work here have been of help I’ll be grateful. However I’m a guy [...]

by Tina de Benedictis, Technical Marketing Manager, Enterprise Desktop Teradici and VMware have just released an updated version of the white paper Using PCoIP Host Cards with VMware View. Teradici PCoIP host cards are designed specifically for the most demanding graphics application users in your…

As I work more and more with vSphere 5 I am finding a few anomalies. One of them appears to be a bug where you cannot switch a VM’s disk format during a storage vMotion, when you target a datastore cluster. To be more precise, it looks like you should be able to, but it [...]

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Eric Siebert has once again started a poll to ask people to vote for their favorite VMware & Virtualization blogs. On his vSphere-Land page you can see the results of the previous voting. This year Eric has added some extra categories for which you can vote. When casting your votes please keep the…

Time is money, and in your VMware infrastructure, network time synchronization ensures that your ESXi hosts are timed to work correctly with other hosts and services.

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VMware vExperts Brian Knudtson (@BKnudtson) and Lane Leverett (@WolfBrthr) will teach you how to get VMware View 5 up and running in this new video training course from TrainSignal called “VMware View 5 Essentials”. They will teach you everything you need to know to get your environment up and…

Another year has flown by!! You may or may not have heard that the vSphere-Land.com Top Bloggers in VMware and Virtualization Award nominations have been released and voting has commenced. Once again I'm both pleased and honoured to have my Blog on the shortlist amongst some of the worlds top…

This years Virtualisation Top 100 Blogs voting sees vmackem.co.uk nominated for the first time.

As ever there are some very talented guys blogging away and its great for me to have my name on the board. I have not been as prolific as I would have liked recently but it has still been a . . . →…