Eric Siebert has once again started a poll to ask people to vote for their favorite VMware & Virtualization blogs. On his vSphere-Land page you can see the results of the previous voting. This year Eric has added some extra categories for which you can vote.
When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.
Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics. (more…)
Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a vSphere Standard license, you might run into an issue with DRS where the affinity rules stay in effect.
As best practice we usually put the vCenter VM on the first host in the cluster using a VM to Host affinity rule in DRS. A few days after entering the vSphere Standard license which doesn’t allow DRS, I tried to move the vCenter VM to a different host, but this wasn’t allowed because a VM to Host affinity rule was still active. When checking the cluster settings, DRS was still disabled. When I enabled DRS, without clicking OK, I could see there still was a host-affinity rule defined in the settings. (more…)
Today, when performing a VMware Health Check, I came across a strange issue with a customer of mine. Well, issue is maybe a big word, but I discovered the VMware Tools version some of the VMs had running, were newer than the VMware Tools version from a newly installed VM. To make sure I double checked by removing the VMware Tools and reinstalling them, again the VMware Tools version was less than the tools version of the suspicious VMs.
The VMs with the very high VMware Tools version had version 8448 running. When checking the VMware Tools about page, it showed: 8.8.0 build 471268. The other ‘normal’ VMs had VMware Tools version 8300. The Windows VMware Tools about page showed 8.3.12 build 493255. The vSphere environment I was running this on had vCenter 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 update 2 build 502767. (more…)
At the Dutch VMUG on December 9th, 2011 I was asked to do a little interview with Alex Rosemblat from VKernel. We spoke about the presentation I did at the VMUG in which I talked about my VMware vSphere Health Check. See the pages about the Health Check in the top menu bar.
Also check out VKernel’s latest release of VKernel vOperations Suite which offers a great way to do performance and capacity management of your vSphere and Hyper-V environment.
When visiting customers I noticed that the VMware admin often doesn’t really know how much free space is left on the datastores and wether action is needed to free up space or get extra capacity. When I show them the datastore overview in the VI Client that shows the warnings and alerts for the datastores, it turns out that they don’t often look at this page because it gives too many false alarms. These false alarms happen because the default values right out of the box are set at 75% for a warning to trigger and 85% for an alarm to trigger. In most cases this is much too soon as the next image shows you. (more…)
