#vBrownBag Episodes

Sunday Turtle Blogging – From the SA Airport

it’s here… or almost. We’ll (Pancil and I) will be presenting at the Virtualization Congress on Wednesday at 3pm, at the MGM Grand. Posts will either be plentiful or rather sparse, depending on how much time we get. With the lineup that’s been put together, I’m sure there will be loads and loads of super
-> Continue reading Sunday Turtle Blogging – From the SA Airport

New Script – Get VM or ESX Host UUIDs (get-uuid.ps1)

UUIDs are wonderful! Really. They’re just not all that easy to get to, at least not when you need more than a few of them at a time. That is where this script comes in: # get-uuid.ps1 # # Takes either a VMHost or VM object from the pipeline, returns the corresponding UUID. Begin {
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The Turtles Are Upon Us – The VESI

So one of the things that did happen whilst I was away, and that does bear repeating (as it’s not marketing fluff) is the Virtualization Eco Shell Initiative and their beta release landing (Thanks Virtua-al). The goal of the Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell is to provide a freeware desktop application for novice and expert IT administrators
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Vacation Is Over, Back To Our Regular Schedule

Ok, so it was over this weekend, but that is when On-Call started, so getting back on track has been a bit off. Sorry! There has been quite a lot that happened over that week too, vSphere (Cloud OS) and yet another pissing match between Microsoft and VMware. We’ll not get into that however, it’s
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Plug It In, Plug It In! – vCenter Client Plug-ins You Should Be Using

Photo by michelphoto53  I Calm across the “Must-have VMware infrastructure plug-ins” post earlier today and got to thinking what plug-ins I’d recommend. Turns out, that my recommendations would not differ too much, I consider these Must Haves: – Update Manager (included) – Storage VMotion. From Andrew at H9Labs – PowerGUI. This may not be for
-> Continue reading Plug It In, Plug It In! – vCenter Client Plug-ins You Should Be Using

Random VI Hardening Tip – Automating MOTD Updates

This post started out as a bit of nonsense. A bit of an exploration into what could be done via the API using PowerShell. What better place to start I thought than the MOTD. Who doesn’t love the way VMware greets you… sometimes repeatedly in the same session with it. Then, I got to thinking…
-> Continue reading Random VI Hardening Tip – Automating MOTD Updates

PoSH Article of the Week! – Secure Credential Storage

While glancing over at PoSH today (the tiny turtle) I was inspired to do a bit of thinking and talking about using PoSH. Specifically the VI Toolkit, it really wouldn’t be blog worth otherwise would it? What I got thinking on, and what someone on irc clued me into, was storing credentials. Why store credentials?
-> Continue reading PoSH Article of the Week! – Secure Credential Storage

Sharing and Snapshots – Another Look at Sharing VMDK Files

Late Tuesday evening I was troubleshooting an issue with a Mr. Smith from #vmware on Freenode. Yes, really, his name was smith. The issue we were troubleshooting was related to sharing VMDK files, between two VMs running on separate hosts. After pointing Mr. Smith to my “Share and Share Alike” and feverently insisting that it
-> Continue reading Sharing and Snapshots – Another Look at Sharing VMDK Files

Virtually Secure – HyTrust Launches Virtual Security Appliance

HyTrust today came out of quazi-stealth mode and released it’s security virtual appliance. It now comes in 6 new flavors of bacon-like goodness. Ok, so not bacon, but just as awesome! From the press release: The new HyTrust Appliance features the following key benefits: Consistent Control – access and configuration controls are enforced consistently across
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It’s Here! It’s HERE! Well, Almost – Pre-Order Hal’s Book

“Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell: TFM” Is now available for pre-order from Sapien In "Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell", you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines.
-> Continue reading It’s Here! It’s HERE! Well, Almost – Pre-Order Hal’s Book

Updates On Suse 11.1 and VMware Workstation

After spending an evening last week or so getting VMware Workstation running on OpenSuse 11.1, I found myself in a situation due to hardware failure, that I had to re-install… again. This time I needed the process for getting Workstation running again looked more like: 1. Ensure haldaemon is running 2. Install kernel-default, kernel-source, gcc,
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We Need Your Help – Guest Posts Needed for the week of April 20 – 24

ProfessionalVMware will be going on a bit of a vacation for the week of April 20-24. Rather than leaving you in the cold however, I figured that this would be a great chance to display some of the best work the community has to offer. That said we’re now accepting guests posts for the week
-> Continue reading We Need Your Help – Guest Posts Needed for the week of April 20 – 24

Is Your NMI Stuck? – More On The NMI Stuck Issue

Is your NMI stuck? Well you better catch it! Hey! I’m allowed to make bad jokes. After all, that is why you keep coming back, no? So to follow up some on our prior NMI issues. It seems that unlike what was stated before, this isn’t specific to resource constraints, x64, or vSMP. In fact,
-> Continue reading Is Your NMI Stuck? – More On The NMI Stuck Issue

ESX 3.5 U4 Now Avail!

Can’t be much more descriptive than that. Check the release notes here. What’s New Notes: Not all combinations of VirtualCenter and ESX Server versions are supported and not all of these highlighted features are available unless you are using VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 4 with ESX Server 3.5 Update 4. See the ESX Server, VirtualCenter, and
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VMware Guide to HA Troubleshooting

This is much better than the post I had written, so here it goes. You are unable to add an ESX Server to a cluster in the VMware High Availability (HA) configuration . This article provides you with steps to: Troubleshoot an ESX Server that cannot be added to a cluster Troubleshoot VMware HA configuration
-> Continue reading VMware Guide to HA Troubleshooting