Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Monthly Archives: October 2009
iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
Posted by on October 29, 2009
I encountered this situation in my home lab recently – to be honest I’m not exactly sure of the cause yet, but I think it was because of some excessive I/O from the large number of virtualized vSphere hosts and FT instances I have been using mixed with some scheduled storage vMotion – over [...]
Installing VMware Workstation on Windows 7
Posted by on October 27, 2009
You may recall I previously posted on problems installing VMware Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7, this problem seems to have been resolved with the upcoming VMware Workstation 7 which adds support for Windows 7 as a guest and as a host. You can download the Workstation 7 RC build here Release Build here and see the [...]
Getting access to VMworld content if you couldn’t make it in person
Posted by on October 25, 2009
Now the noise around VMworld has calmed down I thought I would let you know that the vast amount of excellent technical content that was presented at the event itself is available to stream online or as an MP3 (audio only) or slide download (audio only). As you’d expect, the catch is it’s not [...]
Windows 7 and the Intel 855 video driver problem
Posted by on October 21, 2009
Judging by the several hundreds of hits that this post on my blog gets every day since January I would say there is a *serious* demand from the general internet community to use laptops with the Intel 855 family video chipset with Windows 7, and it’s not even been released to the general public [...]
BlackBerry app for WordPress
Posted by on October 15, 2009
I must be a bit behind the times, but I have just stumbled across the beta version of a blackberry app that let’s you publish and manage your blog directly from your phone, there is also an iPhone version Very cool, you can now all look forward to accidental posts from my pocket and I [...]
VMware AppSpeed Probes and more 2% Maintenance Mode Problems
Posted by on October 14, 2009
Following on from my last post on problems entering maintenance mode with FT-enabled VMs, I seem to have found another one – if you have the rather excellent AppSpeed product deployed on an ESX cluster and you want to put a host into maintenance mode it gets stuck at 2% as it can’t move [...]
VMware FT, 2 Nodes and stuck on 2% entering maintenance mode
Posted by on October 14, 2009
I have a 2 node vSphere cluster running on a pair of ML115g5 servers (cheap ESX nodes, FT compatible) and I was trying to put one into maintenance mode so I could update its host profile, however it got stuck at 2% entering maintenance mode, it appeared to vMotion off the VMs it was [...]
Designing Active Directory – Talk by Brian Desmond in London
Posted by on October 13, 2009
If you’re in the UK and are interested in Active Directory – Brian Desmond (an MVP for AD) will be giving a talk on Active Directory design on 29th October in London. Details here on the ADUG website here and – registration is free. I’ve been working with Active Directory for a long time [...]
Performance Update on Cheap vSphere Server
Posted by on October 7, 2009
My home lab has a pair of HP ML110 servers with 8Gb of RAM running vSphere 4 (more info here) it’s configured in a cluster with iSCSI storage running from an old HP D530 PC with a 1Tb hard disk running OpenFiler. it performs pretty well and meets most of my needs, I thought [...]
My Technical Book Reading List
Posted by on October 6, 2009
I work as a technical architect in a consultancy role in the Windows Infrastructure & Virtualization space, and as such I’m paid for my experience and opinion, but it’s also an important part of my job to proactively keep on to top of industry trends and investigate new technologies that may solve customer problems, [...]
