Packtpub has offered us a discount code for some books, two books about VMware View, or Horizon View as it’s now called. The vouchers are for a nice 30% discount on the two books and are valid until the 25th of October. Implementing VMware Horizon View 5.2 Voucher code MREIVHV30 Instant VMware View Virtualization How-to
-> Continue reading Discounts on VDI books
I wrote a few weeks ago about Infinio and their NFS acceleration product for NFS datastores on vSphere. Since then I realised that one of the clients I’m working at is an ideal candidate for the product. The customer has an aged VDI environment containing some old ESXi hosts and backed by an old low spec NetApp array. The performance of the VDI desktops is limited by the amount of RAM in the ESXi servers and the speed of the storage.
At Tech Field Day 9 last month Infinio came out of stealth mode and showed their upcoming storage acceleration product for the first time. The product places a caching appliance on each ESXi host to accelerate reads from NFS datastores. For server virtualization this can be a huge help as usually around 80% of VM
-> Continue reading Infinio, cache in your ESXi server for your NFS datastores
This week I’ve been working on an upgrade project at a small customer. Pretty routine stuff, take a vSphere 5.0 environment and upgrade to vSphere 5.1, having SRM added another step to the upgrade process. One thing I highly recommend is that you use the vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check fling that Alan Renouf has published on the VMware Labs web site. I did run into a supportability issue around SQL Express.
I’m delighted to let you know that the TechTalks have their first two confirmed sponsors for 2013, Infinio and Nutanix have both confirmed sponsorship. This is the start of the road to this year’s awesomeness. As luck would have it both Infinio and Nutanix are presenting at Tech Field Day 9 which is where I
-> Continue reading vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld
As is usually the case a heap of great sessions didn’t make the cut for presentation at VMworld, commiserations to all disappointed submitters. As we did last year the vBrownBag crew want to help get some of those great sessions from the community in front of the people who will benefit from them. Yes we
-> Continue reading vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld US 2013
This week was the announcement for the vExpert program’s 2013 members and I’m pleased to say that the vBrownBag crew were again awarded vExpert status. In addition the majority of the presenters of vBrownBags in 2012 were also awarded vExpert status. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, the vBrownBags are a community built resource for the community
-> Continue reading VMware vExperts again
Hi everyone, it’s Alastair here, @DemitasseNZ. I missed out on the chance to do the VCAP5-DTD beta exam at the end of last year, primarily because New Zealand shuts down from Christmas for a couple of week as it’s the middle of our summer. So when the exam was released to general availability last week I wanted to get it booked and sat as quick as possible. This morning was the appointed time so I went down to my local Person VUE testing centre and spent a while staring at a screen.
I finally sat the VCAP5-DCA exam on Friday a week ago, way overdue and necessary before I can start teaching the vSphere Optimize and Scale course. My experience was similar to many others and similar to my experience with the version 4 exam. There are a heap of resources out there including the vBrownBags and
-> Continue reading One piece of advise for VCAP5-DCA exam candidates
It’s a fresh new year and so a new start for the APAC edition of the vBrownBag. I’ve decided to make VCDX a target for this year so thought I’d use the vBrownBag to document and support my application and defence process, maybe helping you along the road to VCDX too. This week I will
-> Continue reading New APAC vBrownBag series
Deciding to restart the series the day before the show lead to a small crowd and not a lot of questions.
Follow on below for the Slides and links from the conversation
After a long hiatus due to multiple VMworlds and the backlog of things that needed to be done it is time to restart the APAC vBrownBag. The VCAP5-DCA prep wasn’t lighting me up so I’ve decided to return to what we do best, design. I think that there are a few areas of design that
-> Continue reading APAC vBrownbag returns to design
I’m a big fan of simple vSphere network configurations, one vSwitch with a small number of fast uplinks. This has been my stance since ESX 3 and I think it’s still a good starting point for a network design. I have had some concerns about the vNetwork Distributed switch (vDS) with it’s management through vCentre
-> Continue reading Distributed vSwitch Rollback
It’s Alastair here again, one of the many cool things that is going on in the community area of VMworld next week is Randy Keener’s Unsupported sessions. These are a forum to advance the community’s knowledge of how do do things that VMware never thought you’d want to do with their products. The sessions run
-> Continue reading VMworld Tech Talks “UnSupported” and AutoLab
Hi everyone, it’s Alastair again with more AutoLab news. Today we have released version 1.0 of the AutoLab which is a huge leap. As you may have seen on my Demitasse blog the AutoLab has a sponsor, Veeam are helping make the AutoLab better. In AutoLab 1.0 we not only have the complete vSphere lab in a box but now also the ability to add Veeam Backup and Replication and Veeam ONE into the lab. This allows evaluation testing and training on these products without deploying onto your production vSphere.
It’s Alastair here with the latest AutoLab automation post, this one is a little about the PowerShell automation that helps bring the pieces together. The first AutoLab automation post is here, the second here and the third here.
One of my favourite automation tools for vSphere is the PowerCLI snapin to Microsoft PowerShell. If you are a Windows guy working in Virtualization then you should get to know PowerCLI. I consider myself a real beginner with PowerCLI, I use it when I have a task to repeat but it’s not where I work all day. There are some awesome scripters who are more comfortable on a command prompt than with a GUI, these are the guys whose scripts I have hacked to make my script and you can start by doing the same. If you are a skilled scripter you may despair at my scripts, feel free to email me to recommend better ways.
Hi, it’s Alastair again, this is the third post uncovering the automation that is in the AutoLab. If you don’t know what the AutoLab is then head to my AutoLab announcement post. If you missed the first article on AutoLab automation then you can head there now, then read the second post before returning here.
A rather important part of the AutoLab are the ESXi servers. The server basic builds are automated using a PXE server and the Weasel installer that has been part of ESXi since 4.1. Weasel doesn’t require PXE, it is perfectly happy with CDROM or USB boot, the AutoLab uses PXE to allow central management which makes scaling easier. PXE requires two services, a DHCP service and a TFTP service. In the AutoLab both are provided by the DC VM, the DHCP service is the standard Windows DHCP and the TFTP service is the Jounin TFTP server.
Hi, it’s Alastair again, this is the second post uncovering the automation that is in the AutoLab, if you don’t know what the AutoLab is then head to my AutoLab announcement post. If you missed the first article on AutoLab automation then you can head there now, before returning here.
This article is all about how the windows servers in the AutoLab are built, there were a lot of Yaks to Shave before you can install the VMware goodness.
The APAC series of BrownBags will return at the start of July. This series will focus on the What’s New of VCAP5-DCA as well as looking at a few other VMware products in real world use. The schedule ahead is maintained on my blog and you can signup for the new series here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/885241632 Get
-> Continue reading APAC vBrownBag returning in July
This is another post from Alastair. Just a reminder that Cody is no longer alone in posting on ProfessionalVMware.com. Earlier this month the AutoLab was announced right here on ProfessionalVMware and released on LabGuides.com. We’ve had a huge number of downloads and a great response. For those who missed it the AutoLab is a package
-> Continue reading AutoLab Automation outline