Category: VMware

VMware has produced a 31 page security hardening guide covering the different aspects of hardening the Virtual Infrastructure.  By introducing a layer of abstraction between the physical hardware and virtualized systems running IT services, virtualization technology provides a powerful means to deliver cost savings via server consolidation as well as increased operational efficiency and flexibility.
-> Continue reading VI 3 Hardening Guide

Thomas at Tandem wrote a wonderful PDF on setting up Site Recovery Manager using the Netapp Simulator. PDF Can be downloaded here

Trilead VM Explorer is a management tool that eases management, backup and disaster recovery tasks in your VMware ESX Server environment. You get maximum flexibility: backups can be stored to ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN. Our newest edition even has beta support for the ESX 3i server.
-> Continue reading Free ESX and ESXi Backups – Trilead VM Explorer

Found a great resource explaining quite a few of the esxcfg-* commands, what they are and their use. They’re copied here for future reference. NOTE: These will work from the rcli, SSH to the service console, or via VIMA. I’ve not tested these on ESXi (as the Service Console is ‘unsupported’) To get a feel
-> Continue reading Those esxcfg- commands.

Today, at some ungodly hour of the morning, VMware updated two security announcements: VMSA-2008-0017.1 – Was updated to change some CVE numbers VMSA-2008-0016.2 – Was updated to include information about update 3 As last time you can get all security advisories from VMware’s site: http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/ Technorati : ESX, ESXi, Security, VMware, VMware Security Del.icio.us :
-> Continue reading VMware Security Updates

This is actually a nice VMware common support issue matrix put together by VMwarewolf. Click the link or the picture, extract the zip, open the resulting html in your browser, and go! Download the Zip. Technorati : esx, support, support matrix, vi3, vmware Del.icio.us : esx, support, support matrix, vi3, vmware Zooomr : esx, support,
-> Continue reading Common system management issues in VMware Infrastructure

If like me you accepted most of the defaults the first go around when installing VMware’s Update Manager, you may have found yourself in a situation where there is not enough disk space to contain all of the files. Should this happen, and you need to change the location, you can edit the settings XML
-> Continue reading Update Manager – Changing Default Patch Location

I didn’t know this until today, but according to KB 1687 both soft and hard page faults will cause a context switch into the virtualization layer, which in turn causes additional overhead. This was clued in by a VMware engineer looking over a case of horrid performance that we’ve been encountering. Hard page faults involve
-> Continue reading Context Switched Page Faults

After much exploring, I’ve found a nice little PDF that describes the communication flow, and IP port use. This is brought to you by the Virtualization Evangelist VMware VI network communications and port usage diagram

Came across this in my browsing, figured it was worth repeating here for my own future reference: RPMS for VMWare ESX 3.5 Technorati : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware Del.icio.us : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware Zooomr : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware
-> Continue reading Useful, Yet Scary – 3rd Party RPM’s for ESX 3.5

Despite all of the time you spent planning your virtual machine deployment, inevitably someone will want to make a change to their VM. While some of these may be straight forward, change the CPU allocation, increase the memory allotment, some of these will not be. Say the accounting team had determined they needed 450GB for
-> Continue reading Dealing With Shrinkage, and Expansion – Resizing Virtual Disks

So I wanted to talk on best practices for your Service Console, what it’s for, and why and how to make it redundant. As that’s a lot of information, we’ll break it out in some parts. This first part we’ll talk about what the service console is, and what it does. So what is the
-> Continue reading The Service Console: Part 1 – What is it?

Straight from the VMware Security announcement mailing list: http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2008-0018.html VMware Hosted products and patches for ESX and ESXi resolve multiple security issues. A flaw in the CPU hardware emulation may allow for a privilege escalation on virtual machine guest operating systems. In addition a directory traversal issue is resolved. Read that over again… A flaw
-> Continue reading VMware Security releases

I have a confession to make. It is dire in nature, and will likely surprise most of you. I’m lazy. So much so, that I’m a professional at it. I suppose that sounds pretty bad, and if my boss is reading this (I doubt he is), it’s also quite incriminating, so lets qualify a bit.
-> Continue reading On Laziness – VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows)

I wanted to share some of the various certification resources out there for VMware. It is one of the HOT IT Certifications right now, up there with the CISSP and RHCE, and it’s quite useful as well. At least the class & test were not 100% fluff like some other vendors produce. Right now VMware
-> Continue reading VMware Certification