With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1 it has become even more apparent that the next vSphere release will only have an ESXi version. This isn’t world shocking news since VMware had announce this already at VMworld 2009, but somehow many have been triggered to finally make the switch and install ESXi on their ESX hosts. In this post I will show you how to change the location for the logfiles, set a different swap space location, activate SNMP and change the vmkcore partition. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

As many of you expected, the new VMware vSphere version is called VMware vSphere 4.1. The hints have been clear these past few weeks and today it became official. Today was the official release and we can finally start blogging about VMware vSphere’s latest features. In the next few days I will post a number of articles on the new features, starting with a list of new features today.

First thing that will be most noticeable is a change in naming:

-          The free ESXi has now been renamed to VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi)

-          VMotion is now officially named vMotion

-          Storage VMotion is now officially named Storage vMotion (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

On my blog, on the right hand, the last widget on the page is called “Home Lab” and shows the current state of my ESX lab at home. This WordPress plugin is written by Nicholas Weaver. Its a great little tool.

Copied from his site:

What if there was a WordPress plugin that would display stats from my vSphere home lab or work? Wouldn’t that rock??

Turns out there isn’t one. Or at least there wasn’t one till till now. After a weekend of coding I am happy to present the first WordPress Plugin for VMware vSphere: WP-vSphereStats. If you are super observant you may have noticed the plugin is actually running in the sidebar on the left. Basically the way it works is pretty simple. The WP-vSphereStats plugin comes in two pieces. One is the WordPress Plugin itself. It is tested and compatible with WordPress 2.9 and above. It uses the new widget changes in 2.8 and is dependent on some helper changes in 2.9. The second piece is a Windows command line tool used to pull stats from your vSphere Environment and posts them to a web service enabled by the WP plugin.

More details on his website: http://nickapedia.com/2010/07/12/show-and-tell-first-vsphere-plugin-for-wordpress/

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

This week I’ve had some questions from people on how this “Strategic Partnership” between Novell and VMware, could be the first step to VMware buying Novell or a number of products from Novell. This got me thinking on if that could really be an interesting move for VMware.

Let’s see what Novell has, that could be of use to VMware, think cloud computing, because that is all what VMware is talking about since vSphere was released. A very interesting product Novell has is the “Identity and Security” suite of products consisting of Compliance Management, Identity and Access Management and Security Management. With an ever growing cloud environment, this becomes a very important part of proper cloud management. Add some E-Directory to the whole story and you have an authentication technology for your cloud environment that has already proven itself in very large deployments. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

You probably wonder what has gotten in to me, iPad postings have nothing to do with virtualization. Yes you’re right, but lately I see so many tweets of people in the virtualization community asking for “must have” apps for their iPad, I decided to write this little post about my “must have” apps. Here we go: (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments