On May 3rd, 2012 VMware released some very critical security patches for many versions of ESX/ESXi, (3.5, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0), Workstation and Player. This updates bring the ESXi 4.1 build up to 702113 and ESXi 5.0 up to 702118. Given that you can potentially cause mayhem from inside a guest...
One of the tasks you should complete during the installation of the Cisco UCS Manager is configuring the Fabric Interconnects with a trusted SSL certificate. The procedure is straight forward, and only needs to be completed once, since the two Fabric Interconnects are clustered and the configuration is replicated between...
For those of you using Cisco UCS servers and the new Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2012, check out the UCS Management Pack v2.5. You can download it from here. According to the release notes the following operating systems are supported:Windows Vista Windows Server 2008Windows Server 2008 R2Windows 7What's new...
If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to experiment with configurations but don't want to mess up your production environment, Cisco offers the free UCS Platform Emulator VM. They regularly update the emulator, and their most current version is v2.0.94849.368934. You can download the emulator here. You can...
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...