Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Find all the Good v12n Posts every Week
Posted by on February 26, 2010
If cast my mind back 2 or 3 years, finding good VMware related information on the web was hard, there were 2 or 3 good technical blogs (RTFM, Scott Lowe, Eric Sloof) and there was 1 book by Ron Oglesby/Mike Laverick but that was pretty much it. Since then things have come along leaps [...]
8 Node ESXi Cluster running 60 Virtual Machines – all Running from a Single 500GBP Physical Server
Posted by on February 25, 2010
I am currently presenting a follow-up to my previous vTARDIS session for the London VMware Users Group where I demonstrated a 2-node ESX cluster on cheap PC-grade hardware (ML-115g5). The goal of this build is to create a system you can use for VCP and VCDX type study without spending thousands on normal production [...]
Quick and Dirty PowerShell to create a large number of test VMs with sequential names
Posted by on February 25, 2010
Be gentle, I’m new to this PowerShell stuff – I have a requirement to create a large number of VMs from a template, this is the PowerShell Code I hacked together from a VMTN communities blog post – it’s not pretty but it works for me – you can play with the variables to [...]
Installing ESXi on a Laptop
Posted by on February 24, 2010
Following on from my recent blog posts about the various ways to configure ML115 G5 servers to run ESX, I thought I would do some further experimenting on some older hardware that I have. I have a Dell D620 laptop with dual-core CPU and 4Gb of RAM which is now no longer my day-day [...]
The Big Cloud Debate @CloudCamp London
Posted by on February 24, 2010
I noted with interest that the next CloudCamp London has been announced for Thursday 11th March, the last couple that I attended were pretty similar and other than some useful networking there was nothing really new/different that jumped out at me; so I wasn’t sure I would go to the next one as it [...]
Lost access to VM Network and Service Console when Playing with dvSwitch?
Posted by on February 23, 2010
I have been doing some tweaking in my vTARDIS demo lab for the next London VMUG to make it work with the dvSwitch – this all works fine inside the virtualized ESXi hosts however, I tried adding the physical host to the dvSwitch and it blew up and I lost access to my vCenter [...]
Double-Take puts DR into the Cloud
Posted by on February 22, 2010
A colleague passed me this link today, Double-take have a new product offering allowing copies of app-servers to be replicated to and run on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service (register article here) – syncing disk writes in a delta fashion to an EC2 hosted AMI. I suggested a similar architecture last year using Platespin, recent [...]
Location of Sysprep Files When you Install vCenter on a Windows 2008 Server
Posted by on February 22, 2010
If you need to install vCenter 4 on Windows Server 2008 and want to be able to customize non Windows 2008/Vista and later VMs (i.e Windows XP, 2003, 2000) you need to place the extracted deploy.cab files in a different location than you used with Windows 2003 (C:\documents and settings\all users … etc.) so [...]
Top Marks for Amazon Customer Services
Posted by on February 21, 2010
I have been doing some experimenting with a cheap-ish SSH drive that I purchased last year; over the last week it has become unreliable and got to the stage where I could no longer remove any partitions, even using DBAN and clean OS installs reported a disk error. It was past the 30 day [...]
HP Installable build of ESXi 4.0 Update 1 PSOD on an HP ML115 G5
Posted by on February 19, 2010
If you have a supported HP server and you need to install ESXi either on a flash drive or a local HDD you should really download the HP-specific build from this link, rather than the one you would download from vmware.com as it includes all the HP CIM providers to allow hardware monitoring – [...]
