The free 'non-production use' EMC Celerra VSA (virtual iSCSI appliance) is a great way to test iSCSI and SRM in a lab or evaluation environment. A few days ago EMC released a new version of the virtual appliance (5.6.47.11), based on the latest physical EMC Celerra product. You can find...
Cisco has released a minor update to the Nexus 1000v. They have a video showing some new features. Most of them are security related, and are summarized below. It appears to me VDS is designed to interoperate with the vShields Zones technology in vSphere. Layer 3 control A VSM can...
Ars Technica has a really excellent summary of the major new features in Windows Server 2008 R2. Some of the new features that jumped out at me are: Full Aero Glass with RDP. Great for virtual desktops. Remote server management tool now is network enabled so you can manage remote...
Today I was reading a whitepaper by 3PAR regarding SQL 2008 performance on their storage arrays. It's an interesting comparison of wide striping, RAID levels, mixed workloads, and number of disks. While browsing through the document I stumbled upon a SQL 2005/2008 feature which I was unaware of, but is...
Wow and Exchange 2010 was just recently released and now there's rollup 1. You can download it here. Fairly short list of bug fixes, but involves the crashing of some Exchange services so probably best to install the patch.
*Shocked* to see that Adobe has major security problems with Flash Player and Air. Be sure to download the latest versions, released on December 8th, here. You can read the related security bulletin here.
I was very disappointed when I was looking over the vSphere 4.0 Update 1 compatibility matrix. I was hoping for wide spread Server 2008 R2 support for all roles. When in fact, the only support for Server 2008 R2 is as a guest VM. The matrix doesn't even show vSphere...
You can check out the improved, and officially supported method here. This works for vCenter 4.0 and 4.1. -- After a significant effort of research and trial and error, it appears I have gotten VMware Update Manager (VUM) 4.0 Update 1 to use SSL certificates generated from an internal Microsoft...
In the release notes of vCenter 4.0 Update 1 it mentions that the SSL thumbprint problem is solved. The bug in 4.0 caused various thumbprint entries buried deep in the ADAM LDAP database to not be updated when the certificates were replaced. That caused all kind of issues. Today I...
For quite a while I've been trying to get SSL certificates uploaded to an ESXi 4.0 host which were issued by our internal Microsoft CA. Unfortunately I ran into issues, the last being that adding an ESXi 4.0 host to vCenter 4.0 with the certificate would die at 80%.After additional...
During my process of testing the SSL functionality in vSPhere 4.0 ESXi Update 1, I found a helpful set of OpenSSL commands. OpenSSL is used to generate the certificate signing request (CSR), which is then submitted to a CA which in turns provides you a certificate you can install on...
The much anticipated first update for VMware vSphere 4.0 is upon us. I've been awaiting this update with eager anticipation since we've uncovered some issues with 4.0 in our deployment. If you want to read the release notes for update 1, you can check them out here.If you have already...