Tech Talk

This is part 4 in a multi-part series about 3PAR arrays from an EVA Administrator’s point of view – and specifically here, for the VMware Administrator, too. Running 3PAR StorServ with vSphere 5.1 comes with a short list of best practices from HP, which is great since VMware ESXi does most of the work for [...]

For the last two years, I’ve been behind the curve with VMware vSphere. My deployment has continued to run at vSphere 4.1 while the rest of the world ticked along with 5.0 and 5.1. We were stuck because we relied on VMware’s Update Manager product to handle guest OS patching in our environment and we [...]

The upcoming week is another exciting one with VMworld on the horizon.  I will be on site at VMworld thanks to Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest, just one of the perks of participating in the competition. VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went [...]

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 [...]

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. 

Today, VMware made their official announcement of vSphere, the next generation of virtualization technology in their flagship ESX line.  There has been a lot of coverage of vSphere online in the weeks leading up to today’s big announcement.  To me, the most interesting information and the most sought after is the answer to one simple [...]

I may have already mentioned that one of our projects for the year is to transition our corporate ESX cluster from 2U hardware onto blades.  The process of transitioning does not come without some concern and some caveots moving to the blade architecture.  We feel that blades are a good fit in our case for [...]

The past month of my life has been spent dealing with the fall-out over a massive failure of our local blade enclosure.

I’m wondering what everyone else in the world does…  I’m investigating running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine in order to remove two additional physical servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise in a cluster.  I’m also very interested in running vCenter as a Linux virtual appliance when that becomes available.  Is anyone out there running vCenter [...]

Twas the night of new years, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  The little one had passed out, and we’d put her to bed.  We had all celebrated with Carson, Dick Clark and the rest. Mom in her kerchief and I in my cap, had just settled [...]