Tech Talk

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 [...]

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 [...]

Long Distance VMotion is by far the best session I’ve attended and the most exciting news for me of the VMworld week this far.  The session was a presentation of a research project performed by VMware, EMC and Cisco.  The session presented four options for performing a long distance VMotion using stock vSphere and existing [...]

Session had a pretty simple purpose – expose us to how you can leverage SQL Server Reporting Services (a free Microsoft product accompanying Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008) to produce reports for information contained in the vCenter Database.  Its a concept I had not thought of, but made perfect sense when I saw the [...]

Two of the announcements not getting much press from the floor of VMworld this week were announced during Paul Martiz keynote on day 1 by HP.  HTC is primarily and HP shop, so it looks like an area of interest for me and one that might be getting neglected elsewhere, so here goes some news [...]