Add Fusion IO driver to VMware Auto Deploy
A customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped with a Fusion IO card, the UCS 785GB MLC Fusion-io ioDrive2 to be exact. For this customer I had already deployed a vSphere environment a year ago, fully based on VMware Auto Deploy and it now was time to try and add a driver to this Auto Deploy environment, which I had never done before. It wasn’t an easy road, but I wrote down all the steps and hope it helps you should you ever have to do this too. … [Continue Reading]
The Doctor is IN on SRM, Upgrade to vSphere 5.1, vCSA and VCAP-DCA
A few days ago I blogged about my new idea in this post: "The Doctor is: IN" and I received a lot of positive comments and even my first request for assistance. So… here we go !!! Tonight ( June 7th ) at 19:00 CEST the first session will go live. That is, if Google Hangouts works because last night during my test run there were some issues with Google Hangouts. This first session has been requested by Ryan Conley. Ryan is originally from Nashville area, moved to Greenville for two years which is where he got his feet wet with ESX/ESXi 4.x and 5.0. He took a position in San Francisco over a year ago and is now the primary person for managing two vSphere 5.0 clusters for two separate companies. He passed VCP5 in April and as a result of the prep time he is now hooked on learning more and more. He has his IaaS exam scheduled for the 17th of June and plans to attend VMworld in SF and sit the VCAP-DCA exam since it will be 75% off. Work wise he is about to standup a DR cluster in SF and begin implementing SRM to tie the two together. … [Continue Reading]
The Doctor is: IN
Many of us in IT read a lot of whitepapers, blogposts, how-to articles and view numerous Podcasts or training video's to learn all the details about new products or features. Still, I don't always get some of the details or can't find the info I need. Meeting people at VMUGs or VMworld gives me the changes to ask for those last missing piece of information. But what if you don't have that chance? When I blog about stuff I'm sometimes surprised about the comments I get and about how more people than I thought were struggling with the same questions. In responds to the comments I have been able to help quite a number of readers of my blog by e-mail and lately I did a few Google Plus Hangout sessions to help in an even better way. And that is when I came up with the following idea: Why not do a video-chat help session? … [Continue Reading]
How to move VMware Single Sign On (SSO) database
Customer had all his VMware databases for vCenter Server, Update Manager, Single Sign On (SSO), vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback running on one big SQL Server where they shared resources with other databases. They asked me to move the databases to a new MS SQL Server because the load of the VMware databases was more than expected. I prepared the move by reading a few VMware KB's that described how to move the databases, but still experienced some issues, that is why I wrote this blogpost to have a good manual for the next time I have to move these databases. This first post shows how to move the SSO database. … [Continue Reading]
Design question: Why vCenter Server Datacenter?
When working on a design in which there would be two physical datacenters, I started to rethink about why I would create multiple datacenters inside vCenter Server. I noticed that almost all example designs I look at that cover two physical datacenters, also have two datacenters in the vCenter Server design. But why? When searching for an answer in the vSphere 5.1 documentation, the only reason mentioned to create a datacenter is "You can create multiple datacenters to organize sets of environments.". But it also states that creating datacenters creates limits: "Inventory objects can interact within a datacenter, but interaction across datacenters is limited. For example, you can hot migrate virtual machines from one host to another host in the same datacenter, but not from a host in one datacenter to a host in a different datacenter." … [Continue Reading]
Add Fusion IO driver to VMware Auto Deploy
A customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped … [Read More...]
The Doctor is IN on SRM, Upgrade to vSphere 5.1, vCSA and VCAP-DCA
A few days ago I blogged about my new idea in this post: "The Doctor is: IN" and I received a lot of positive comments and even my first request for assistance. So… here we go !!! Tonight ( June 7th ) at 19:00 CEST the first session will go live. That is, if Google Hangouts works because last … [Read More...]
The Doctor is: IN
Many of us in IT read a lot of whitepapers, blogposts, how-to articles and view numerous Podcasts or training video's to learn all the details about new products or features. Still, I don't always get some of the details or can't find the info I need. Meeting people at VMUGs or VMworld gives me the … [Read More...]
How to move VMware Single Sign On (SSO) database
Customer had all his VMware databases for vCenter Server, Update Manager, Single Sign On (SSO), vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback running on one big SQL Server where they shared resources with other databases. They asked me to move the databases to a new MS SQL Server because the load of the … [Read More...]
Design question: Why vCenter Server Datacenter?
When working on a design in which there would be two physical datacenters, I started to rethink about why I would create multiple datacenters inside vCenter Server. I noticed that almost all example designs I look at that cover two physical datacenters, also have two datacenters in the vCenter … [Read More...]
VMware vCloud 5.1 Networking part 4 Cell Load balancing
Hope you enjoyed the previous series on VMware vCloud Director networking. In this post I will show you how to make the vCloud Cells available through a Load Balancer using the vShield Edge. By publishing two or more vCloud Cells behind a load balancer, it is easier to separate management network … [Read More...]
Bare Metal Cloud for your Auto-Lab by Mike
Today Mike Laverick drew my attention to his blogpost about BareMetalCloud. He writes about the possibilities to run your virtual ESXi host on their cloud offering. And best of all, by using a promocode, something like MikeLaverickIsAnAwesomeDudeAndThisWillGiveMeCloudForFree or maybe a shorter … [Read More...]
Veeam first to offer real vCloud Backup?
I don't often publish news bulletins and especially not about products that haven't been released yet, but today I made an exception. In my mailbox I found Veeam's announcement of Veeam Backup & Replication v7. The announcement is about the ability to back-up vCloud Director VMs including the … [Read More...]
Voting for the top virtualisation blogs of 2013
It's that time of year again, Eric Siebert launched the new vLaunchpad top VMware/virtualization blogs survey and is asking you to vote for the best blogs on virtualization in 2013. Go to: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1165270/Top-vBlog-2013 and select your top 10 favourite blogs. This year … [Read More...]
vCloud disk space thresholds crossed
Oh those little things in life that sometimes cost you a whole day before you figured out that you we're doing it all wrong. This was one of those days where I got alerted by some colleagues about vCloud Director reporting "Disk space red threshold crossed." When looking at the "Datastores" … [Read More...]
