Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making [...]
On this day, three years ago, I posted my first entry on Tech Talk. At the time, the idea was to try to contribute back to a community of technical resources whose blogs had contributed so much knowledge to me. I had found their blog posts about VMware ESX and vCenter invaluable and the information [...]
1:30pm – Updated with revised judging panel. When I think of a reality show, I think of people competing for prizes, being judged and getting voted out of the house, off the stage or off of the island. Take that concept and apply it directly to tech bloggers and what would it be? It would [...]
One of the additional questions I have had about the introduction of vSphere 5 is how I would update my VMware Certification to the vSphere 5 level, VCP5. Fortunately, the answer is really simple. Existing VCP4 holders will be able to take the VCP5 exam and upgrade their certification without any additional course requirements until [...]
UPDATE: VMware has announced an increase, effectively doubling the vRAM entitlements that were originally announced. This post is dated, and you should refer to VMware‘s site for official information on pricing… VMware previewed vSphere 5.0 today via a live webcast with CEO Paul Martiz and CTO Steve Herrod. The vSphere 5 releases should be available [...]
After almost a year, I have had problems with the VMware WebServices (the Tomcat web apps packaged into vCenter server) not working properly. At every upgrade, I have had issues where the apps that were “fixed” by support break again. I knew I had to be doing something wrong. I thought that vCenter was just [...]
Its pretty easy to see where I stand on PowerCLI from the headline on this entry. Disclaimer, I haven’t used it extensively, but I can already see the why VMware has chosen to embrace PowerCLI for scripting. These are some of my initial thoughts after some light usage — in short, I think PowerCLI is [...]
Last week, I found a deal I could not pass up. B&H Photo has a deal on a Drobo for $299 though 6/30/2010. If you’ve never heard of a Drobo, it is an external storage enclosure from Data Robotics that offers some enterprise-class, automated mirroring/striping for your data across multiple hard drives. Data Robotics calls [...]
Like many shops, we have finally attained buy-in from all our stakeholders for virtualization. As a result, we’ve pushed more and more into our infrastructure. And while VMware is the most datacenter ready solution for virtualization, it is not without its shortcomings — monitoring and visibility into the infrastructure being one of the biggest. While we were [...]
Since we began upgrading our clusters to ESX4, we have been having strange “failed physical path” messages in our vmkernel logs. I don’t normally post unless I know the solution to a problem, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Our deployment has been delayed and plauged by the storage issues that I mentioned [...]