The other week I was telling a co-worker that in most cases using VM snapshots in ESX was evil and should be avoided in all but exceptional circumstances. He gave me this look like I grew a third eye, my ears fell off, and my skin turned green.I then conveyed...
If you've been following my blog, you know that last year our project acquired a 3PAR T400 Fibre Channel array. One of the features which really sold us on 3PAR was its ease of use and the ability for our technical staff to perform all aspects of maintenance including major...
A couple of days ago VMware released Workstation 7.0.1. No earth shattering updates, but now officially supports Server 2008 R2 and Vista SP2 as host and guest operating systems. You can download it here and read the release notes here.
Network world has a great article on new Ethernet standards that Cisco and HP are proposing to the IEEE for ratification which are directly related to a virtualized environment. You may have heard of Cisco's VN-Tag feature, which was a proprietary extension to Ethernet developed by Cisco and VMware. VN-Tag...
I found a good article that speculates on some possible enhancements that could be coming to vSphere this year and into next year. It will be interesting to see how closely these rumors track with reality as the year unfolds.Highlights of the speculation include:32-way VMs512GB RAM or more per VMEnhance...
Although I personally haven't done it, you can easily P2V Windows servers running on HP Proliant hardware. However, you have major cleanup work to de-install all of the HP-specific software, drivers, agents, etc. If you don't do this your VM will likely run extremely slow and suffer lots of problems.To...
VMware has finally released their draft version of the security hardening guides for vSphere 4.0. After taking a look at some of them, I'll make a few observations:1) Totally different format than previous versions, now organized in tables. Very similar to the DISA STIG security guides.2) VMware adopted various security...
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has imposed much stricter licensing controls in Windows Server 2008 and beyond. This is in an effort to stem the flow of piracy, which is probably pretty rampant in some communities. To help combat these evil forces in the world, Microsoft introduced Volume Activation 2.0....
1. Create a folder anywhere and name it:GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}2. Click on the control panel looking icon that the folder turns into.3. Have fun!You can also rename a new folder as well and paste in the string above.
A couple of weeks after taking and passing the VCP 4.0 exam I took the 3.5 exam today. Passed! It was funny..several of the questions on this exam carried over nearly word for word on the vSphere exam. The project I support at work is exclusively vSphere based, but I...
Whoohoo! Passed my VMware vSphere VCP exam today. I guess all that studying was worth it after all! Scored 419. Note, if you have a VCP 3.0 VMware just extended the deadline to January 31, 2010 to take the VCP 4.0 exam without the upgrade class. The original deadline was...
If you use HP Proliant servers and want the HP-ized version of ESXi 4.0 update 1 you can now download it from here. The ISO image is about 380MB. The only difference between the HP download and the vanilla VMware ESXi 4.0 U1 ISO image is the inclusion of Proliant...