Month: August 2010

SYSPREP resetting your renamed Administrator and Guest accounts?

Lately I've been working on our Server 2008 R2 vSphere 4.1 template and ran into an interesting issue. During the template build process we rename the Administrator and Guest accounts, to comply with best practices. However, after vCenter executed the customization specification the accounts got reset back to Administrator and Guest....

vSphere 4.1 Performance Best Practices

With the release of ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1, VMware has greatly increased the performance of vCenter. I accidentally stumbled upon this VMware document called VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices.It's a great read covering benchmark performance differences between vCenter 4.0 and vCenter 4.1, plus a lot of tips...

Automate vCenter 4.1 64-bit DSN Creation

Back in the days of vCenter 4.0 it required a 32-bit DSN to connect to your SQL database. Now that vCenter 4.1 and ESX 4.1 are out, it now requires the use of a 64-bit DSN. This makes sense as vCenter now requires a 64-bit server. The PowerShell script I...

Staying thin in the real-world with a 3PAR array

If you aren't familiar with thin provisioning, it's a technology being widely adopted by storage vendors that only allocates back-end disk space to a LUN when data is written. For example, if you present a 500GB LUN to a server and only write 100GB of data, the array only uses...