After you’ve spent the time installing VMware Data Recovery (vDR), you may find that some of the defaults do not work well. Some of these, like the retention policies are an easy change. Others, like the behavior of the vDR appliance, however, are a bit more difficult. To that end, you can create a datarecovery.ini
-> Continue reading Advanced vDR Configuration
If that title won’t have my mother calling me… Well, at least it someone’s attention. Prior to VMware Player 3.0 I never gave it much time of day. Sure it worked, and sure there was a way to work around the create VM limitation and the like, but it just wasn’t… well, you got what
-> Continue reading I’m Having An Affair – With VMware Player 3.0
The last time we touched upon LUN resigning, it was during an odd hour of the night. Looking back now, some interesting VMware KB articles have cropped up around this very topic. First there is KB 9453805, which covers this process for VI3, seemingly from top to bottom, it also greatly expands on my post,
-> Continue reading Revisiting Lun Resigning (Bad things at 2AM)
Note: This is a brief story where I was forced to sit back and reflect on just how cool this Virtualization stuff really is. Please feel free to disregard however. Normally I don’t write about the VMware Workstation or hosted products. It just doesn’t happen to be where I spend most of my day. Mind,
-> Continue reading Using VMs as Personal DR
While I’d love to be able to claim I was clever enough to think of this on my own, that would straight up be lying (I really am not all that clever :). Well, it would be more than lying, I’d not be giving proper credit to his awesomeness Rich Brambley at VM/Etc for coming
-> Continue reading vCenter Client on Linux – Single App RDP and You!
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
I likely should have started with a post or two about vDR (VMware Data Recovery), what it is, and how to install it. Instead, I’ll point you to some of the docs on those: Info & Installing. The installing guide is especially recommended after I spent a few days unsuccessfully installing vDR (Hint: Use the
-> Continue reading Few, More, Many – vDR Retention Policy Autopilot
Amazon just published my 4 star review of “Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS (Ensure Business Continuance on Virtualized Networks by Implementing Layer 2 Connectivity Across Layer 3) ” Before we get too deep into it, I need to be up front that while I LOVE Virtualization, I still flirt a bit with networking and the
-> Continue reading Book Review: Interconnecting Datacenters Using VPLS
I recently got a comment on a post I had done a while back on VMware tools and Time Sync. While the one-liners there may be useful, they don’t particularly explain how they got to the end results. With that in mind, today I hope to explain some of the logic used when you need
-> Continue reading A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
This one came at me from left field recently. The task at hand was to cold migrate one of a Virtual Machine’s disks from it’s old LUN, to a new one with some more breathing room. Simple enough, no? We’ve all done it a million times. What happened however, was that I received a “Error:
-> Continue reading Migrate Storage – “Failed to Connect to Host”
Ever have to log into a the console of an ESX VM… over a slow connection? Then you’ll know all about the character repeat that comes along with that. If you haven’t experienced this… consider yourself lucky. It is especially interesting when trying to type passwords. So how do you defeat this? You set the
-> Continue reading PowerCLI Script of the Week – Set-Keydelay.ps1
While searching for some snippets of VMware PowerCLI code earlier in the week I came across some awesome resources, both resources I’ve not seen/used before, as well as those that I’ve used, but have not linked prior. Note, that most of these are just the PowerCLI section of an equally awesome blog. VMware PowerCLI Community
-> Continue reading 11 Awesome PowerCLI Resources
I just received my copy of Steve Jin’s “VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere ”, As I tech edited the book I’ll not post a long review, other than to say that the book is a good resource, and overall a good book. If you are, or will be programming
-> Continue reading vSphere SDK – The Book!
Time is critical. In VMs this criticality is even more pronounced. Time slips… CPU instructions go askew, and things get weird. That said, there are situations when you may wish to disable the built in VMware Tools Time sync service… completely. What do I mean by completely? Well, even with the tools time sync set
-> Continue reading Time Is Marching On… Disabling TimeSync, Completely.
I caught wind of VMware Workstation 7 having been released today from VM/Etc. It can be downloaded from here. Amongst the exciting features are a few that caught my eye: AutoProtect This one had me do a double take actually: The AutoProtect interval can be set to half-hourly, hourly, and daily. From there you can
-> Continue reading Workstation 7 RC – With A Side of Awesome
I’ve been following Scott Vessey’s VMware Training Blog for a while now, and have overall been impressed with the content he’s managed to pump out. To that end, Scott has complied some of his content, as well as some new content into a new site called Think Virtually. For anyone training for the VCP, VCDX
-> Continue reading Awesome VMware Training Resource
Amazon just posted my five star review of Edward L. Haletky’s “VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment ” Besides the incredibly log title, here is what I had to say: A wise person once said that "Virtualization is not a destination, but a journey". The same has also been said about
-> Continue reading Book Review: VMware vSphere & VI Security
While going over TA1541 – Cool Little Things Marketing Did Not Tell You About vSphere 4.0 from this years VMworld, and came across this gem, a service console tool, that’s been there since ESX 3.5, and will report on all sorts of SCSI statistics. [root@esxServerOfDoom root]# /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -? /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats: invalid option — ? VscsiStats
-> Continue reading Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – vscsiStats
Saving one of the best for last. This tool is every bit as awesome as any of the other tools listed this week, and then some. Why? What other tool can you point at your vCenter and with a few clicks, generate a Visio. Yeah, that’s right, virtual infrastructure documentation in a few clicks. It
-> Continue reading The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – The VESI