As people quickly found out when vSphere 5.1 was released, installation and configuration of vSphere 5.1 SSL certificates was very painful and no accurate VMware documentation existed. Through a lot of work and help from some of my readers, I published a process that was pretty successful but required some workarounds and...
If you want to run Windows Server 2012 on Cisco UCS blades, fear no more! As of the 2.0(4a) release they now have official support in firmware, and an updated drivers disc. Just login to Cisco TAC, get the firmware and new driver disc. As you can see in the...
STOP THE PRESSES! The solution to your vCenter 5.1 woes may be at your finger tips. If anyone has tried to install and configure VMware vSphere 5.1, you may have run into a plethora of difficulties. My 14 part vCenter 5.1 installation series, found here, have gotten massive page views...
Today VMware released an update for ESXi 5.1, and the new build number is 838463. This is a bugfix only release. You can read the full bulletin here. As always, you can download it from the patch center here.PR919634: When you perform an upgrade from vSphere 5.0 to vSphere 5.1...
Today Cisco release a new firmware bundle for their UCS servers, 2.0(4b). No major fixes in the bundle. You can find the full Release Notes here. If you want to run Windows Server 2012, 2.0(4a) is the minimum supported version you need to be running. You can check out my blog...
For those of you using HP storage arrays (P2000, P4000, P6000, 3PAR, XP) HP has released a major update to their vCenter plug-in. You can now actively manage a wider range of HP arrays, you get full vSphere 5.1 web client capabilities, and expanded VASA support. You can check out...
A while back I wrote a blog article on how to inject VMware drivers (PVSCSI and VMXNET3)Â into a Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 image. You can check out that article here. But given those are now legacy operating systems, I'm refreshing the procedures for Windows Server 2012 (they'd...
Today while trying to download the latest HP customized VMware ESXi Installation I found a download page that I previously wasn't aware of. It's a one stop shop for HP ESXi 4.x, 5.0 and 5.1 customized ISO images. The 5.x links point directly to VMware download locations, so you don't have...
A few days ago VMware released updated View clients for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, iOS, Linux and Android. According to the release notes the following enhancements were made to the clients. You can download the updated clients here.What's New in View Client for Windows 5.2 Windows 8 support...
A great new feature in Windows Server 2012 is data deduplication. Data deduplication uses sub-file variable-size chunking and compression, which together deliver optimization ratios of 2:1 for general file servers and up to 20:1 for Hyper-V virtualization data. Microsoft has some great articles on dedupe, such as this one and a...
In Part 1 of this short series of configuring Windows Server 2012 SMB transparent failover we configured two VMs using the vSphere 5.1 web client to access shared RDMs. Then mounted and formatted on one node with a 16KB allocation size, to better optimize shadow copies for share folder performance. Now that...
Windows Server 2012 is Microsoft's biggest server OS release since Windows 2000. The number of features, enhancements, and optimizations is mind boggling. One major area of focus was SMB, which is Server Message Block. SMB is the protocol used to access file shares across the network. SMB 3.0 was introduced with...