A couple of months ago when upgrading one of my Nutanix clusters to vSphere 5.5 U1 I started to see what appeared to be random loss of connection to my NFS datastores. All VMs on the datastores would become inaccessible, then a few minutes later, access would be restored. As...
After a bit of a delay, I'm finally publishing how to update your ESXi SSL certificate. The process is pretty much unchanged from the 4.x era, but what is new is my Toolkit script. It has been updated to include ESXi certificate support. This is accomplished all in PowerShell, and does...
Hot off the presses are some ESXi 5.1 patches. This build of ESXi 5.1 (1157734) fixes several bugs and more importantly addresses some security issues. As always in any environment, please test out the patches thoroughly before putting them into production. Each environment is unique, and issues may surface that could cause you some headaches. These...
VMware vSphere 5.1 update 1 is probably one of the most recently anticipated updates of the VMware stack and it has finally hit the streets. For those of you following the release of vSphere 5.1, you have seen the GA release last fall, followed by 5.1.0a then a couple of...
A few days ago VMware released an updated custom HP ISO image for ESXi 5.0 Update 1, which includes all of the HP specific drivers and agents. The big difference between this release and prior HP ESXi 5.0 releases is that you can download them directly from VMware and not...
UPDATE 10/26/12: A new blog post with updated links is here.HP just released their June 2012 VMware ESXi 4.1 U2 and ESXi 5.0 U1 ISO installation media. Nearly every driver in this custom ISO has been updated from the previous release. You can find the entire driver set versions here....
VMware released a security advisory on June 14, 2012 and patch for a variety of virtualization products. Details of the affected products and the vulnerabilities are below. You can download the ESX(i) patches from here. VMware Product Running Replace with/ Product Version on Apply Patch ============= ======= ======= ================= vCenter any Windows...
Similar to my post on how to create custom Cisco UCS ESXi 5.0 installation media, I thought I would tackle the same problem for HP ProLiant servers. Yes, HP does provide regularly updated ESXi installation media that bundles in their drivers, but it doesn't always have the latest security patches....
A few days ago VMware released a public draft of the vSphere 5.0 Hardening Guide. Unlike the vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide that I've talked about before, this version only comes in an Excel Spreadsheet form. Personally, I think the PDF format of the 4.0 Guide is easier to read, but...
UPDATE 2 5/15/2012: Looks like VMware/Cisco pulled the 5.0 U1 custom ISO installation media. So follow my blog post below to create your own. UPDATE 1 4/23/12: Cisco released a customized vSphere 5.0 U1 installation ISO with all of their latest drivers. You can download it here under OEM Customized Installer...