Year: 2011

Schedule VMware UMDS Downloads with Windows Task Scheduler

VMware UMDS (Update Manager Download Service) is a product which ships with vCenter that allows you to download patches for VUM, then use them in air-gapped networks where VUM can't directly download updates from the internet. UMDS 5.0 has some nice enhancements from 4.x, which helps limit the amount of...

XenDesktop 5.5 Resource Calculator

Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is...

Tips for measuring Windows 7 VDI IO Requirements

When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as...

Unattended vSphere Utility Installs

Sometimes you may want to install the various vSphere utilities (PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, vSphere Client, and VUM PowerCLI) to non-default directories, or use a silent/unattended installation to automate the process.Below are four batch files that you can run which will install the respective tool to the custom installation directory specified....

vSphere 5.0 Documentation Links

For those of you that want easy access to vSphere 5.0 documentation, I stumbled upon a location that has well organized PDF and e-book resources. No more need to search all over VMware's site for a specific piece of documentation. You can check out the link here.

VSP3116: Resource Management Deep Dive

I finally managed to get into a session by one of the VMware rockstars, Frank Denneman, who has co-authored several books that I highly recommend. Frank stated this topic could be a four day class alone, and this was just an hour, so it went quite quickly and just scratched...

Did you know about Cisco UCS Express?

Today while I was walking around the vendor expo at VMworld 2011, I saw a very interesting product from Cisco. I was familiar with the datacenter UCS product, but a mini version caught my attention. Called UCS Express this is a micro ESXi server that slides directly into their ISR G2...

BCO1946: Making vCenter highly available

vCenter is a business critical service that when it goes down can cause substantial chaos, although VMs will happily keep running while it is down. Using VDI? Forget spinning up new VMs, or rebooting VMs. Using vCD? Forget doing anything while it's down. HA? Yes that will keep working (for...

VSP1999: Advanced esxtop usage

This session was quite advanced and had a lot of troubleshooting examples which are hard to adequately capture without the slides, so I'll just touch on some of the counters he used during some troubleshooting examples. Maybe in future posts I'll focus on one subject like storage stats and recreate...

VSP3864: Best practices for virtualized networking

This session was a bit more high level and basic than I had hoped for, but here are the highlights: Virtual Port ID load balancing is the default option and the least complicated option. IP hasing is more advanced and requires Etherchannel to be configured on the switch VTS (virtual...

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