Build A Better Cloud With StratoGen VMware Hosting
In my previous post on VMware vSphere5 Auto deploy I explained how to setup an auto deploy environment. This is great for initial setup and to deploy your hosts, but what when an update is released by VMware? The easiest thing is to just delete the deploy rules and recreate them which is ok for a small environment but not in a large environment. In this post I will show you how to adjust your existing rules. (more…)
When preparing your Virtual Infrastructure environment for vSphere 5 and vCenter 5 you also need to think of all the vCenter applications that are dependent on vCenter. One of them is vCenter Heartbeat. To be able to run vCenter Heartbeat on vCenter 5 you will need to upgrade vCenter Heartbeat to version 6.4. Normally upgrading vCenter Heartbeat isn’t a big deal but there has been a change from 6.3 Update 1 to 6.4. Where you could normally use a configuration of “identical nodes”, you will now have to switch to “non-identical nodes” according to KB 1014435.
From the KB article: “Important: When performing an upgrade to vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.4 from 6.3 Update 1 with Identical nodes or from any previous version, you must first migrate from Identical nodes to Non-Identical nodes before performing the upgrade.”
End of 2009, beginning of 2010 I put an Iomega StorCenter IX4 to the test and published the results in these two blogposts:
Putting your storage to the test – Part 1 iSCSI on Iomega StorCenter IX4-200D and part 2. Recently Iomega sent me their new StorCenter PX4-300R for testing purpose and I was happy to run some Iometer stress tests on it. I was very anxious to learn if the PX4 would be able to outperform the “good old” IX4.
The PX4-300R is a rack mountable model of 1U height and comes with rails and the necessary power and UTP cable. When I read the several websites where the unit is sold, it normally comes without disks. The unit I received had four Hitachi 2.0TB HDS723020BLA642 disks in it configured in RAID5, giving me 5.4TB of disk space. Setup is easy, you plug the UTP cable and power cable, boot the unit and check your dhcp server to see what address it picked up. Then there is a web interface that gives you all the management options you need. (more…)
Many installed vSphere 5 soon after the official release, starting with vCenter 5 and then reinstalled their ESXi hosts. Of course you need the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client as well to set up your environment, which you install on your Windows desktop or inside a Windows VM. Once you have your configuration up and running and want to perform some basic tasks, it sometimes would be great if there was a light weight client that doesn’t run on just Windows systems. You guessed it, the vSphere Web Client. The vSphere Web Client is a great way to manage your VMs and perform VM related tasks from the popular browsers ( Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Mozilla FireFox 3.6).
Often I receive book for review and after I read it, it goes on to my bookshelf and just sits there for a long time. With the VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference its a different story. The book contains a lot of scripts which doesn’t make it a reading book you keep on your nightstand. This is the kind of book you take with you where ever you go and that clearly shows when you look at my copy. This one I drag along to every customer I visit, just to make sure that I have my “PowerShell bible” at hand when I need it. This book you do judge by its cover, because it shows that it is read often and has become an important part of the toolkit you drag along. (more…)
