Instead of our usual faire of flash cards and demos, I’m going to mix it up this week by bringing in a special guest: Jon Hall of VMware Education. We’ve had Jon on a few times in the past, to talk about the certification process, the VCAP program, and the VCDX program. As we’re at
-> Continue reading BrownBag 12/08/2010 – VMware Certifications w/ Jon Hall
While this isn’t as big a problem as it used to be, Context Switches in applications can still bring a VM to it’s knees. In this post I’m going to link you to some resources as to what context switching is, how to look for it, and why excessive context switches hurts performance. What Is
-> Continue reading Context Switching, Some Resources
Black Friday? Nah… BrownBag Friday! Here’s the video for this weeks BrownBag: ProfessionalVMware VCAP DCA Section 2 BrownBag from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo. If you like what you see… be sure to check out our other BrownBags here. If you need the full video, you can download it from the Vimeo link above.
As we’ve been progressing down the BrownBag Series, I’ve been creating flashcards along the way. Here they are so far. Section 2 – Networking Section 3 – DRS / Performance They’re hosted at Flashcard Exchange, and will work with the MentalCase App. The best part? They’re open for folks to add and edit, so feel
-> Continue reading VCAP-DCA Flash Cards – Sections 2 & 3 Available
The version of Likewise-Open that ships with VMware’s vMA is a bit old, and for one reason or another, it may need to be upgraded outside the normal window for upgrading the vMA bits. So… here goes the update: Checking the Current Install You can check the currently installed version with an rpm -qa: $
-> Continue reading Upgrading Likewise on vMA
Recently I set upon a quest, one of grand scope and sure to bring honor to my family. Well, maybe. This quest you ask? This quest was to attach the VMware vSphere Management Appliance to Active Directory. Like any good quest, this was not without it’s challenges. First, Connect vMA to Active Directory: This is
-> Continue reading Connecting vMA to Active Directory (Troubleshooting)
In all things wonderful about life, scheduling is one of them. Unfortunately I’ve a conflict that cannot otherwise be avoided, and this will have to cancel the BrownBag for November 10, 2010. All is not lost however! The Fat Lady has not sung, and we will be returning to you in two weeks time (November
-> Continue reading Schedu-Fail – No BrownBag Nov 10, 2010
As much as I loathe love VMware’s PDF documentation, I always get the warm and fuzzies when I happen upon something like this. An online reference for the vSphere CLI (vCLI) commands. Enjoy!
Thanks all who stuck around even after our late start. We still managed to have a productive call, both with the flash cards during the call, as well as the long fireside chat with Jason Boche afterwards. Thanks again Jason! Also thanks to everyone else who hung out on the call. Now onto the meat
-> Continue reading VCAP-DCA BrownBag Follow-Up (Section 3, pt 1)
After purging my vCenter database, I seemingly corrupted it (I should have taken a snapshot first). In this case, as the database was small (read: 1 host, 6 VMs) I decided to rebuild it. This is not something you’ll want to do lightly, as well, everything kinda goes away. If you do proceed with this
-> Continue reading Rebuild the vCenter 4.1 Database
My home lab vCenter is a self contained Windows 2008 R2 VM, running vCenter 4.1 on SQL Express. Last night, I ran into an issue where the vCenter service would not start, in fact, it was quite angry. Why? Well it seems after 14(ish) days I had hit the 4GB database limit. Here’s the process
-> Continue reading Pruning vCenter 4.1 Database Using SQL Express
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends…Tonight Sean (@vFail) covered the ins and outs of the VMware vMA. Video: ProfessionalVMware VCAP BrownBag – vMA from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo. Slides: VCAP DCA – vMA View more presentations from ProfessionalVMware. Notes: VMware vMA – http://vmware.com/go/vma Resoureces: http://vfail.net http://geeksilver.wordpress.com http://vexperienced.co.uk http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/certedu/certification/vcap http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vcap-datacenter-administration-exam-landing-page-vdca410.html http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/ VCAP Updates
-> Continue reading vFail BrownBag The Second: vMA
The Problem! Was doing some work with UDA and nested ESX & ESXi installs this weekend and ran into an interesting hiccup: Or on ESXi: What? Can’t format what? But we’re working with nested ESX, it’s a VMDK, format it! I tried any number of things here: Different controller types, disk sizes, partitioning within the
-> Continue reading “Could not Format VMFS” – Nested ESX
As promised, the video is indeed online and embedded below: Video: ProfessionalVMware/vFail VCAP-DCA BrownBag Objective 1 from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo. Slides! Vcap dca section 1 View more presentations from ProfessionalVMware. Show Notes: Uber Celerra VSA – http://nickapedia.com/2010/09/12/ubertastic-celerra-uber-vsa-v3-unisphere/ Storage Blogs http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/ http://storagemonkeys.com/ VCAP-DCA Resources http://thesaffageek.wordpress.com/vcap-dca-dcd/ http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/certedu/certification/vcap http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vcap-datacenter-administration-exam-landing-page-vdca410.html http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1585-Looking-for-VCAP-practice-questions-Here-they-are….html iSCSI Multivendor Post Pluggable Storage Architecture http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/vmware-vsphere-4-1-psa-pluggable-storage-architecture-understanding/ How
-> Continue reading vFail BrownBag Follow-Up!
OK, so every environment has “That Guy”… if you don’t know what I’m on about, take a look at what floated past on Twitter this evening from @vSeanClark: RT @techmute: Some people really make me wish vSphere had the option "take a snapshot when this guy logs in as an admin" <- startup idea? Well…
-> Continue reading Protecting your Virtual Machines From “That Guy”
As I have the worst luck remembering what this is each and every time I need it, I’m throwing it up here for quick reference. Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostStorage -RescanAllHba Yes, it really is that simple. You can use a few of the other Get-* search functions to narrow the list of hosts, say for all
-> Continue reading PowerCLI One-Liner Rescan All HBA’s
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
The survey results are in! In summarized form: Most of you prefer Wednesday’s, mostly in the evening. The suggestions were mostly: a) Make sure your lab works and b) Consistency. As far as format, of the options I presented (Lecture, Guest Speaker, Open Discussion, Live Lab) all weighed about equally. Finally, most of y’all are
-> Continue reading VCAP-DCA Brown Bags – Sign up now!
What started as a journey to deploy a few OVF/OVA files into fusion turned into quite the entertaining experience. Why? Well, following the advice here and here, I reinstalled the latest version of Fusion. However, there was still no OVFTool. How’s that? Well, VMware provides two different Fusion installers: There is much more than McAfee
-> Continue reading OVFTool and VMware Fusion, an Odyssey
For those that have been asking, yes we are still doing BrownBags. I have been lapse in putting one together in a while, however. This is not because I am lazy (not entirely anyways), but rather because I care about what I’m delivering and the benefit it brings to y’all. Rather than spend a long
-> Continue reading BrownBags Update!