Month: December 2009

I’m now a VMware vSphere VCP!

Whoohoo! Passed my VMware vSphere VCP exam today. I guess all that studying was worth it after all! Scored 419. Note, if you have a VCP 3.0 VMware just extended the deadline to January 31, 2010 to take the VCP 4.0 exam without the upgrade class. The original deadline was...

HP ESXi 4.0 U1 Installable now Available

If you use HP Proliant servers and want the HP-ized version of ESXi 4.0 update 1 you can now download it from here. The ISO image is about 380MB. The only difference between the HP download and the vanilla VMware ESXi 4.0 U1 ISO image is the inclusion of Proliant...

New EMC Celerra VSA for ESX/Workstation Released

The free 'non-production use' EMC Celerra VSA (virtual iSCSI appliance) is a great way to test iSCSI and SRM in a lab or evaluation environment. A few days ago EMC released a new version of the virtual appliance (5.6.47.11), based on the latest physical EMC Celerra product. You can find...

Cisco Nexus 1000v hits v1.2

Cisco has released a minor update to the Nexus 1000v. They have a video showing some new features. Most of them are security related, and are summarized below. It appears to me VDS is designed to interoperate with the vShields Zones technology in vSphere. Layer 3 control A VSM can...

What’s new in Server 2008 R2? A lot!

Ars Technica has a really excellent summary of the major new features in Windows Server 2008 R2. Some of the new features that jumped out at me are: Full Aero Glass with RDP. Great for virtual desktops. Remote server management tool now is network enabled so you can manage remote...

Make SQL 2005/2008 Thin Provisioning Friendly

Today I was reading a whitepaper by 3PAR regarding SQL 2008 performance on their storage arrays. It's an interesting comparison of wide striping, RAID levels, mixed workloads, and number of disks. While browsing through the document I stumbled upon a SQL 2005/2008 feature which I was unaware of, but is...

Exchange 2010 Roll-Up 1 Released

Wow and Exchange 2010 was just recently released and now there's rollup 1. You can download it here. Fairly short list of bug fixes, but involves the crashing of some Exchange services so probably best to install the patch.