Author: Guest Post

This guest post is by Melissa Palmer who blogs at vmiss.net, where you can find her back catalogue of posts. Melissa was the creative (evil) genius behind the scenarios for the Virtual Design Master Challenge. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

A few months ago I decided to go all in on the vSphere Web Client. I was one of those people that wasn’t a huge fan of ESXi when the Service Console was dropped, so I decided to take a different approach here and embrace it. The verdict? I like it. A lot. I’ve gotten so used to it, that when @DiscoPosse and I tried to do a Test Track at VMworld, I had a bad time. I kept on saying “but I know exactly how to do this in the Web Client!”, and of course, it was iSCSI. So it was a really bad time. As I write this and wait for my vCenter to reboot, I’m actually using the C# Client to access the host, and I can’t wait to get back to the web client.

(Bye bye!  Might as well bite the bullet and get used to not using it)

[…]

This guest post is by Steven Kang who blogs at ssbkang.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, I wrote a PowerCLI script to audit which virtual machines are running on vDisks in relationship. With this report, I could correct naming convention of both VMFS volumes and vDisks and find out which VMFS volumes are not in relationship.

In this blog post, I will be going through:

• Products Used
• Script & Explanation
• Sample Output

[…]

This guest post is by Steven Kang who blogs at ssbkang.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

INTRODUCTION

I’ve worked on rebuilding a vCenter server due to one of the services failing to start and in this blog post, I will try and assist people who is planning to rebuild the existing vCenter server.

[…]

This the first guest blog post, find out more about the guest blogger program here.

This post is by Steven Kang who blogs at ssbkang.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts.

Introduction

VMware vCenter Orchestrator (hereafter vCO) was deployed a few weeks back and it’s been decided to deploy PowerShell plug-in for advanced automation workflows. Due to the lack of documentation, it wasn’t straightforward installing & configuring PowerShell host. In this post, I would like to share my experience with you.

For those of you who’s not familiar with vCO, the following documentations would be helpful. Also, attaching PowerShell plug-in documentation.

• Orchestrator Document
• Orchestrator PowerShell Release Notes 1.04
• Orchestrator PowerShell Plugin Document

[…]

Ever wondered what a path failover event looks like in /var/log/vmkernel? Ever saw the event but when reading the vmkernel log you weren’t sure what exactly you were looking at? Well, VMware has recently published a KB article that describes the process in detail: Understanding the storage path failover sequence in VMware ESX 4.x

More often than not, storage design considerations are NOT taking into account when users start rolling out VMware View environments. This can lead to unexpected performance issues, particularly when using linked clones. Using linked clones on an array with SATA drives and very little cache is just asking for trouble however there is a way
-> Continue reading How to convert linked clone VMware View desktops to fully deployed (thick)

If you are looking for a detailed explanation of the features and enhancements to the storage stacks in ESX 4 as well as the differences between storage in ESX 3.5 and 4.0, the following presentation has what you are looking for: Vmug V Sphere Storage (Rev E) View more presentations from guesta849bc8b. vSphere Storage: Features
-> Continue reading vSphere Storage: Features and Enhancements

Note: This is a guest post provided to us by an extremely smart gentleman, with whom I’ve worked closely with in the past. At this time however, homeboy prefers to remain anonymous. I get questions like this all the time: "I’m trying to help educate my management on the importance of having the right microcode
-> Continue reading The Importance of SAN Maintenance

Note: This is a post written by Pancil. Pancil normally sits quietly in a dark corner of the blog sanity/spell checking my posts. He is also a Sr. Virtualizaiton Engineer at Rackspace, where he and I work side by side, making the "Private Cloud" Awesome. So, while reading another blog Cody suggested that the ideas
-> Continue reading vZen: Real world principles to ‘Virtualization Zen’ designs

While it is a somewhat known fact that you used to be able to shrink disks using vmkfstools -X in ESX 2.x, the option was removed as of ESX 3.0. The reason for this probably stems from those few customers that were not familiar with using the command properly and ended up cutting off too
-> Continue reading How to Shrink a VMDK file in ESX

So literally a few minutes ago the GA release of VMware vConverter 4 was pushed out to the interwebs. Fire up your browser and head over. The documentation and website hasn’t fully been updated, however I can confirm that the download link has been updated. We’ll no doubt have a good few tests going the
-> Continue reading VMware vConverter 4 GA RELEASE!

Using extents gives you flexibility with your volumes and adding extents is a very simple and usually painless process. The ability to dynamically increase your total storage for a single VMFS volume is a feature we all love, but how many of us actually use it? Is it worth the risk? Are you running extents
-> Continue reading To extend or not to extend? That is the question.

So, I’m a feed reader, doing crazy amounts of information processing every day, from Cars, to Gadgets, to Cats… The thing that I read the most about of course, is Virtualization. Not just VMware, but Hyper-V and Xen too! (and VirtualIron, and Cloud Computing, and any number of other virtualization things. While right now VMware
-> Continue reading ESX3i, VMware’s best kept secret?

So the big news last week was that VMware decided it’s time to rename VMware Virtual Infrastructure (or VI as the peeps on the street are calling it these days) to VMware vSphere. The current version seems to be staying on the VI title and the next version will move to this odd naming structure.
-> Continue reading VI is dead… Long live VI…

Many of you will say “RAID 5, of course!” and for those of you that do I would like to ask why? Is it because you really understand the differences between the different RAID levels? Granted that you may but have you ever had to do a RAID rebuild of a RAID 5 volume? How
-> Continue reading What RAID level do you use for your VMFS?

so, Veeam the purveyors of all things shiny like Veeam Backup, Veeam Reporter, etc… They’re feeling nice and keeping the holiday cheer going! So sign up here Veeam XMAS Freebie! No idea what it’ll end up being, but here’s the clue: ‘If you liked FastSCP, you’ll love this’ Patrick

I’ve just come across a blog post from Virtual Strategy and he lists quite a few awesome sounding scripts in this post, you can read it here. The ones that really catch my eye are the ones that generate documentation for the admin, quite useful when you have to quickly spit out reports for clients.
-> Continue reading Top 10 Powershell Scripts by Virtual Strategy

Hey Folks, So I’m new to these parts. I work with Cody, and will be posting my experiences and world in the virtualization wonderland that is our work life. To start with I’m going to focus on update manager for large environments, and then move onto other projects as they come up. I’ve just recently
-> Continue reading Introduction: Patrick Ancillotti (pancil)