vSphere 5–PXE Installation Using vCenter Virtual Appliance

September 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

With the release of VMware’s vSphere 5 product, the addition of the vCenter Virtual Appliance has been a welcome addition to management options. However, vCenter Virtual Appliance includes DHCP and TFTP functions that can be used for a PXE installation environment. Read on for instructions on using the vCenter Virtual Appliance as a PXE host for ESXi host installations!

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vSphere 4.1 U1 Released. Fixes Specific For VM Backups

February 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Like everyone else, I have been reviewing the Release Notes for the latest Update 1 release of vSphere 4.1, but I decided to point out specific fixes that will make full image VM backups better for everyone. Note that I work for Veeam Software, but the fixes I am referring to are all VMware resolved issues that surface from time to no matter what backup solution you use. There are numerous other fixes and impovements in the U1 release, but, since most of my world is backup these days, these particular items “popped out” at me.

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VMware Auto Deploy – Stateless ESXi

September 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few days I’ve been looking into deployment tools to help me deploy a large amount of ESXi Host’s in a short space of time. One of the tools I’ve been looking at is VMware Auto Deploy

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Using vMA As Your ESXi Syslog Server

June 1, 2010 By 3 Comments

Many people don’t know that it’s recommended to use a syslog server with ESXi. As an alternative, they can use an application built in to vMA called vilogger.

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Using ESXTOP With VMware ESXi

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Just a quick post about using ESXTOP with VMware ESXi. Obviously in ESXi there is no Service Console so we have to use the vMA (vSphere Management Assistant) to help us.

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Virtualisation: Learning The Hard Way

January 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

They say that you learn the most when you make mistakes and things go wrong.  Well, last night I certainly must have learned a lot.  What started as a simple physical re-organisation of my hardware turned into a rebuild of my production VMware ESXi server – finishing at 1am.

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Review: DroboPro – Part II

December 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This is the second in a series of posts looking at the DroboPro from Data Robotics Inc.  Previous post(s):
Review: DroboPro – Part I
Previously I discussed a few frustrations with connecting my new DroboPro to ESXi, the target environment for my new device.  I’ve now managed to get the ‘Pro connected and visible within ESXi.  See [...]

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VMware vSphere vDS, VMkernel Ports, and Jumbo Frames

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

You may recall that I wrote about how to enable jumbo frames on VMkernel ports used for IP-based storage early last year. Here are some updated instructions on how to do the same with vSphere, only this time using a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).

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Fishworks Simulator Hint and other VSA stuff

March 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Fishworks Simulator has been driving me a bit nuts; I couldn’t get ESXi to reliably use a Fishwork’s iSCSI LUN as a data-store; it would consistently hang whilst installing an Virtual Machine. I coudn’t see anything wrong but it would just die.

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