For those of you that don't already have a good monitoring solution for your VMware infrastructure, and use MS Operations Manager, you need to check out the Veeam Management Pack. It's a good solution for single pane monitoring of your MS and VMware infrastructure. They are currently running a special...
Ever since I can remember Compaq/HP has offered their Insight Manager. Hot off the presses is their new 7.0 version which sports some major upgrades. You can download the multi-gigabyte ISO images here for free. Even if you don't use Insight Manager, you might be very interested in their totally...
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...
One of the new features added to vSphere 5.0 is a web client. The web client is a slimmed down version of the vSphere client that you can access from a browser. It doesn't have 100% of the features of the fat vSphere client, but it's a great way to...
During a recent vSphere 5.0 cluster setup, in which I had no need for Fault Tolerance, I kept getting a profile compliance failure for the cluster. The compliance errors were:Fault Tolerance is not support on this host. Reason:Fault Tolerance is not support on this host. Reason: FT logging is not enabled...
Quite unexpectedly tonight I got an email from VMware telling me that I've been designated a VMware vExpert 2012. According to the welcome e-mail:You’ve done work above and beyond, helping others succeed with VMware, and we here in the Social Media and Communities team are delighted to welcome you to...
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...
If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to install Windows on a physical server, you will quickly realize not all of the needed drivers are baked into Windows. While Cisco does provide small ISO files for various drivers you can mount during the installation process, it requires manual...
So this is an interesting announcement....I would not have guessed that IBM would market a distributed virtual switch for the vSphere 5.0 platform. When I think of networking gear IBM is not a brand that springs to mind. They did acquire BNT a little while back, but that was blade...
Last week there was a leak regarding HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, but today the entire cat is officially out of the bag. The cat really should be a tiger, the changes are so significant. G7 servers were fairly incremental improvements over G6, with only a few minor changes. Gen8 appears to me...
One of the challenges with managing a lot of virtualized HP servers is firmware updates. Unlike Windows or Linux hosts where you can perform relatively simple on-line updates, ESX(i) hosts must be done offline. Traditionally you boot from the HP Firmware DVD and apply the updates. The update process was...
For those of you that have a VMware VCP4 and want to take the VCP5 exam without additional classroom training requirements, your time is short! February 29th, 2012 is the last day you can take upgrade exam. For some good study material, I recommend the vSphere Resource Kit site. It...