Tech Talk

Somehow I missed posting this, but the deadline for upgrading a VCP to version 4 without needing the required course has been extended through the end of January, 2010.  For any existing VCP3’s, this is a great opportunity to save the $1800 for the official course as long as you are able to pass the [...]

Short version:  To grow a VM with and RDM in virtual compatiblity mode, you must VMotion the VM after performing your storage rescans to recognize the additional space.  After the VMotion, the guest OS will see the additional space and be able to access it.  

As in my post about Lessons Learned on ESX4 rollout, we had a pretty serious hiccup with our storage and the ESX systems in December while trying to bring up our ESX4 environment.  The primary trouble uncovered was what I’ll call “controller ping-pong”.
An EVA normally has two (maybe more, I’m not primarily a storage guy) [...]

Following my November upgrade of Flex-10 VirtualConnect on my blade enclosure, I have begun my rollout and upgrades to ESX4 on a new blade cluster as well as one existing cluster.  There are quite a few lessons that I’ve learned on my roll-out. 

As of 10am today, I am officially a VCP4.  I now have to wait for my official packet to arrive from VMware, but I have done the hard part and passed the exam.  For any VCP3’s out there who still haven’t taken the test, there is still time to take the test without needing the [...]

After completing our upgrade to vSphere’s version of vCenter Server, there were a few incompatible plugins left from our VI3 install.  Most of these were easy to remedy – especially the VMware provided add-on products like Converter and Update Manager which were on the same DVD media as vCenter Server.  But, if you have any [...]

Well, I have finally gotten all my notes out from VMworld and posted on the site. I followed the conference with a family vacation on the West coast, so my time to get these notes processed and posted was limited. I attended several additional sessions, but these were the best of the sessions [...]

Deja vu.  Well, almost.  I sat in on a simliar session last year and I wondered what has now changed with vSphere being available and what new expectations could be had for virtualizing Exchange and I found answers.  First of all, as the speaker put it – VMware has eaten their own dogfood and virtualized [...]

HP’s Virtual Connect technology offerings are all about consolidation of network and fiber channel, much in the same way that blade chassis are to the physical server offerings.  Virtual Connect allows for fewer physical connections to be shared and flexibly assigned to blades within an HP BladeSystem.   I have been using this technology for [...]

VMware Data Recovery is a new feature introduced with vSphere 4 which attempts to be a full-featured backup solution for the ESX lineup.  There are some limitations to the software that limit it more towards small to medium business – not really enterprise customers, however, I’d consider my company a small enterprise user and we [...]