Welcome to Part 2 of the 15 part vCenter 5.1 Update 1 installation series. This post will guide you through the process of creating the vSphere 5.1 Update 1 vCenter SSL certificates. ALL production environments should use trusted SSL certs, not just "high security" environments. Key infrastructure services are probably running on vSphere, so security...
Welcome to the 15-part VMware vCenter 5.1 U1 installation series! Given all of the new components and architecture of VMware vCenter 5.1, I wanted to walk through the entire installation of vCenter 5.1, assuming a greenfield environment. These instructions are assuming you are using vSphere 5.1 Update 1, which was released in...
Today is the day! VMware has publicly released vSphere 5.1, and all of the associated software such as vCenter and vCloud director. You can download the full suite here. They also have a HP ProLiant customized ISO image, should you be using HP servers in your environment. To access all...
A few months ago I blogged about how to create your own custom Cisco UCS ESXi 5 U1 installation media, with the latest security patches and drivers. There was also an ISO image on VMware's web site, which magically disappeared for a while. Well, now it appears to be back....
If you have the pleasure of working with a Cisco UCS server farm, you know ease of which you can upgrade firmware. A few days ago Cisco released the 2.0(3c) version of their UCS software. This is a minor release which fixes a few specific bugs. If you won't run...
When configuring a cluster in vSphere, one of the options that you should always configure is the VMware EVC mode. What is VMware EVC mode? It's the Enhanced vMotion Compatibility setting, which enables vMotion across multiple generations of processors. New processors often come with new instruction sets, and if the...
HP has released a new version (2012.08.0)Â of their "HP Service Pack for ProLiant", a Sept 2012 revision. For those of you unfamiliar with their packaging changes, this is a consolidated bootable ISO that does both offline and online firmware/driver updates. It really simplifies the updating of HP firmware on ProLiant...
O'Reilly Media has released a free eBook version of their "Introducing Windows Server 2012" book. I quickly flipped through the beta version, and found it quite informative. There are so many new features, literally hundreds, in Windows Server 2012 that this is a must read for anyone going to use...
Speaker: Chad Sakac, Vaughn StewartThis was a really great session! Had two of the best sessions on the last day of VMworld. Each protocol has different configuration considerations Majority of customers use block protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE) NetApp: NFS 50% usage, block the other 50% from autosupport data Best flexibility...
Speakers: Michael Cory, Jeff SzastakThis session was by far the best this week! 160 slides in 60 minutes, packed to the gills with actionable information on properly virtualizing your SQL server. In short, there's no reason why you can't virtualize SQL and have it meet business performance requirements. 80% of SQL performance...
This was a panel discussion going over the history of the vSphere hardening guides, current state, some common issues, and future direction for ensuring compliance with regulations such as HIPPA, PCI, DoD STIGs, etc. Upshot is that VMware really listened to customers with there vSphere 5.0 hardening guide and it's...
This session was extremely technical and went over the inner workflows of HA. For a better and more in-depth details, I would strongly suggest getting the VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book. HA protects against three failure modes: Host/VM failures; host network isolated and datastore PDL; Guest OS hangs and...