Template VM’s are specialized VM’s. They’re designed to allow you to rapidly re-deploy preconfigured virtual machines, with little to no fuss. Often, however, that is not the case. I mean, who doesn’t just right click and “Convert to Template…” What that action does, is simply mark a file letting vCenter and ESX both know it’s
-> Continue reading How Do You Prepare Your Templates?
Picture by: Harold_5056@flickr Because it’s still cold around these parts. At least, still cold for a Floridian living in Texas. Here is a comforting article about how these little guys survive the winter: Questions about how various animals survive winter come across my desk (or rather my computer screen) rather frequently. Every species living in
-> Continue reading Sunday Turtle Blogging – How Do Turtles Handle The Winter
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!
About thirty years ago in the jungle in South Korea I was spending some time living as a monk. One of the things I learned from these monks, was the ancient art of Dump reading. Yes! That’s right, I can tell the future by reading the finer texture and smell of a dump. Ok, while
-> Continue reading How To Read Dumps – ESX Crash Dumps That Is
Not sure how useful these will be to anyone else, but here is how to get & use Dell’s DSET utility on ESX: First pull the DSET utility from here. sftp (scp, etc) Dell’s DSET utility to your home dir. chmod 777 the DSET util [root]# ls -alh total 24M -rwxrwxrwx 1 bunchc bunchc 24M
-> Continue reading Vendor Utilities – Dell DSET and ESX
Trouble with your HA config? vCenter (VirtualCenter) giving you all kinds of crap while setting it up? Let’s take a look some things to do when ‘Configure HA’ bunks up. Do you meet the requirements? There are a few things that you need in order to make sure all the bits of HA work. There
-> Continue reading Trouble Getting VMware HA Working? – Basic Troubleshooting For VMware’s HA
Good news for North Carolina Turtles, from thestate.com A House subcommittee approved a bill (H.3121) designed to prevent the mass exportation of our turtles for food or the pet trade. The bill allows no more than 10 of certain species of turtles to be taken from the state by any individual, and no more than
-> Continue reading Sunday Turtle Blogging – North Carolina Bill Preventing Turtle Export
Mike Laverick is doing something cool… he’s starting to slowly release his SRM book, chapter by chapter. Today, was chapter 1 To celebrate the arrival of my first advertiser to RTFM. I would like to begin the process of slowly releasing my SRM book free to download. The SRM book will remain commercially available for
-> Continue reading Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager – Chapter 1 Now Available!
Not sure when I came across this, and how late to the game I am on it, but alas, cleaning out my Firefox tabs today I came across a deployment diagram for the Nexus 1000v on ESX4: Some key observations of importance: * The version of ESX running here is ESX 4.0 (not yet
-> Continue reading Y’all See This? – Nexus 1000v Architecture Write Up
Incase you’ve missed this, project VRC & VMware have released XenApp TS benchmarks with conflicting results, which seems to have the virtualization blogosphere in a tussle. Here is a good summary. Honestly, I think the debate is good, as is having multiple benchmarks around this. Like a election, one should do their own research, and
-> Continue reading And the Pissing Contest Begins!
Avnet Tech Games! This year’s AvNet Tech Games features a VMware Virtualization Challenge: VMware Virtualization Challenge – Student teams will be given three unique physical enterprise computer platform scenarios with the goal of producing a 3-5 year roadmap maximizing their business value while factoring in proper ROI and architectures with consideration for the current virtualization
-> Continue reading VMware Tech Games & GA Southern
Let’s say you have a metric heck ton of hosts, and you need to check them… all. To see if VMotion has been enabled properly. How do you do it? Well, you could hire that out of work banker now out in front of the grocery store to come and click through all of the
-> Continue reading Now Where Did I Put My VMotion?
Didn’t forget this week. Really I didn’t. I did however disconnect from the ‘tubes on Friday, and not plug back in till this morning at work. Today is some new fishing rules aimed at saving the turtles
The link over on the VMTN blog is a bit off and identifies this as #32, but I assure you, this was the VMTN podcast #33, discussing the VITK 1.5 release, and a few other things. TalkShoe Link
Came across this in my RSS reader, and figured it was worth a mention. Project VRC (Virtual Reality Check) provides vendor neutral white papers on how to best configure Xen, Hyper-V, and VMware for different workloads. Do you wonder about virtualization? Are you seeking for the best virtualization platform for your specific environment? Project VRC
-> Continue reading Project VRC!
Mr. Epping’s High Availability “Deepdive” page is definitely worth a read and a book mark. A VMware HA Cluster consists of nodes, primary and secondary nodes. Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all “node states” which are synced between primaries. Secondary nodes send their state info(resource occupation) to the primary nodes Nodes send a
-> Continue reading HA “Deepdive” Page at Yellow-Bricks
When I fired up my RSS reader today I notices a lot of new/updated KB articles at VMware’s site about timing in virtual machines. I figured it’s worth while to link them here just in case. Determining and changing the rate of timer interrupts a guest operating system requests Time in a Linux virtual machine
-> Continue reading Much To Do About Time
So while ESX 3.5 (not sure about i) may have tcpdump and tcpslice: [root@esx root]# tcp tcpd tcpdump tcpslice They’re of limited use, at least with the way ESX implements networking, vSwitches after all, are good and proper layer 2 devices. Now, that is not to say you couldn’t do something with arp poisoning, but…
-> Continue reading Tapping ESX – Network Sniffing Your VI
This is one of those that you’ll want to print out, laminate, and had to all of your co-workers. Really, it’s that good. It’s the VI3 Quick Reference Card. It’s updated for VI3 update 3, and it makes Chuck Norris want to shave. This is thanks to the awesome work of Forbes Guthrie at vmreference.com
Things break. They always do. Chaos is inevitable. So how do you get insight into some of the chaos that was occurring in your Virtual Center when disaster strikes? Turns out, the VI Client makes this quite easy. After you get your Virtual Center service running again, connect using the VI Client. Once connected… well
-> Continue reading Log Bundles, of the Virtual Center Variety