Category: vSphere 5.0

DISA VMware vSphere 5 STIG Released

DISA VMware vSphere 5 STIG Released

Hot off the press DISA has released the VMware vSphere 5 STIG, which includes vCenter, ESXi and VM components. For those of you familiar with U.S. Government IT systems, you've probably heard of the DISA STIGs. STIGs are Security Technical Implementation Guides, which set the baseline for a variety of operating systems, network...

New VMware Cisco UCS Drivers for vSphere 5.x

new VMware Cisco UCS Drivers for vSphere 5.x are now out for the fnic and enic drivers. The fnic and enic drivers are for the Cisco VIC cards, which come in a few different flavors. These are the most common FCoE cards used in the UCS blades. They are now at...

VMware Whitepaper on CPU Scheduling Performance

In a virtual environment CPU scheduling is extremely important. You very likely will have more vCPUs than pCores, so the hypervisor has to play some "tricks" to fairly schedule VMs among the finite hardware resources. With each version of vSphere VMware has tuned and optimized CPU scheduler performance. VMware design goals...

HP Releases vSphere 5.0 U2 Custom ISO

In case you missed my previous blog post, yesterday VMware released vSphere 5.0 Update 2, which fixes a plethora of bugs and plugs security holes. You can find my host here, with links to the release notes for all the gory details. Right on the heels of VMware releasing 5.0...

VMware releases vSphere 5.0 Update 2

Yesterday VMware released vSphere 5.0 Update 2. You can find the full ESXi release notes here. vCenter 5.0 Update 2 release notes are here. Highlights of Update 2 include: Full support for installing vCenter on Windows Server 2012 Full customization support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Support for...

New VMware ESXi 5.0 Patch Released

A few days ago VMware released a new patch bundle for ESXi 5.0. The new build number is 821926. You can find the full details here. As always, you can download the patches from their download portal here. The fixes are of severity "Important" and require VM shutdown and Host...

Cisco UCS ESXi 5 U1 Custom ISO Image Download

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....

How much does VMware EVC mode matter? Which one?

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...

Unattended vSphere Utility Installs

Sometimes you may want to install the various vSphere utilities (PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, vSphere Client, and VUM PowerCLI) to non-default directories, or use a silent/unattended installation to automate the process.Below are four batch files that you can run which will install the respective tool to the custom installation directory specified....

vSphere 5 VDI Licensing Redux

Among the licensing kerfuffle surrounding vSphere 5.0, VDI users may have overlooked some interesting information that VMware posted about VDI and vSphere 5.0 today. Myself and other bloggers like Brian Madden have done some analysis on what vSphere 5.0 means for VDI, mostly for non-VMware products such as XenDesktop. However,...