The great battle of enterprise storage is on! The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting … [Read more...]
Shorts: VMware vCloud Director not displaying the web portal
June 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment
A colleague of mine approached me today with a question on our vCloud Director environment. He tried to log in to the vCloud Director portal, and was unable to log in, because there was no page being displayed at all. After checking if I was able to ping the interface, I logged on to the machine … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive – Book Review
December 10, 2010 by Leave a Comment
I've been hearing little teasers from Frank Denneman (One of the Authors) about this book since way back in the summer when it was first announced. Now I finally have my hands on a copy. Most people would have heard of the two guys (Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman) who wrote this book and … [Read more...]
What is VAAI, and how does it add spice to my life as a VMware admin?
December 6, 2010 by 1 Comment
EMC EBC Cork I spent some days in Cork, Ireland this week presenting to a customer. Besides the fact that I’m now almost two months in to my new job, and I’m loving every part of it, there is one part that is extremely cool about my job. I get to talk to customers about very cool and new … [Read more...]
Shorts: VMware vCloud Director installation tips
November 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment
So folks, I helped a colleague install the VMware vCloud Director. In case you are not aware of what the vCloud Director is I can give you a very rough description. Think about how you deploy virtual machines. Usually you will deploy one machine at a time, which is a good thing if you only need … [Read more...]
Consolidate Helper Snapshot Appears On vSphere VM
September 30, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Your vSphere VMs may be running from snapshots even though you didn’t create them. That is, if a scheduled job which auto creates snapshots runs into a datastore with insufficient free space. In this scenario a special Consolidate Helper snapshot will be created. The following screenshot shows … [Read more...]
Whats new in vSphere 4.1 Storage: SIOC, VAAI, and DRS
September 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
So I haven’t done a lot of real time blogging at VMworld this year as I’ve been busy trying to see and soak up as much as possible. It’s not every day that you get access to the likes of Chad Sakacc (VP EMC / VMware alliance) Scott Drummond (EMC – ex VMware performance team) and a whole … [Read more...]
Is My Favorite vSphere Tool Going Away?
August 24, 2010 by 4 Comments
The following post was contributed by Dwayne Lessner (@DLink7). While going through the release notes for vSphere 4.1 I noticed one of my favourite vSphere tools be might be going away. vCenter Update Manager (VUM) 4.1 and its subsequent update releases are the last releases to support scanning … [Read more...]
What Is VAAI And What Does It Mean For Virtualization?
June 25, 2010 by Leave a Comment
You’ve probably heard VMware virtualization and storage talk about VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration. If you’ve listened to episode 4 of VIRTUMANIA or watched the recent video from the vExpert Panel session at the Carolina VMUG Summit then you’ve heard me talk about it with some of … [Read more...]