Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: vSphere
vSphere App for iPad Download
Posted by on October 26, 2010
Whilst we all await the “official” vSphere administration app for the iPad, as previewed at VMworld I found myself needing something to control my home vSphere lab environment from my shiny new iPad. The iPad has now integrated itself as the device of choice with my wife & kids and is in regular use [...]
Where Next for VMware Workstation?
Posted by on April 28, 2010
I love VMware Workstation, I have used it since about 1999 when I was first introduced to virtualization and it totally revolutionised the way I did my home and work lab study and later production systems. Since then it has always introduced new features with every version that seemed to be back-ported into the [...]
With the move to ESXi is NFS becoming more useful than VMFS?
Posted by on March 2, 2010
Now that VMware are moving away from ESX classic (with service console) to the ESXi model I have experienced a couple of issues recently that got me wondering if NFS will be a more appropriate model for VM storage going forward. in recent versions of ESX (3.5 and 4) NFS has moved away from [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Using VMware Fault Tolerance to Protect a Virtualized vCenter machine
Posted by on November 30, 2009
In my lab I have a virtualized vCenter installation, it works well and I’ve had no problems with this configuration in the last year. I wanted to try to build a 2 node demo cluster for my VMUG session and needed vCenter to be protected by FT – so an individual host failure would [...]
vSphere Performance Overview Page – This Program Cannot Display the Webpage
Posted by on November 23, 2009
When trying to browse the performance overview tab in the vSphere client you may get this error; “This program cannot display the webpage” However, the advanced tab works ok and you can still build custom charts. Luckily, this is pretty simple to fix, the cause of this problem is that the VMware Virtual Centre [...]
Get a move on and do your VCP4 upgrade
Posted by on November 18, 2009
If you are a VCP3 you’ll need to get a move on and upgrade your certification to VCP4 unless you have time to sit (and pay for) some classroom training next year – you need to have passed the exam before December 31st 2009 (i.e in 43 days time!) Also bear in mind there [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
