Tech Talk

VMware released vCenter Converter 5.1 Beta to the general public last month and its available for download now from the VMware VMTN Community. As I found with my recent vSphere 5.1 upgrades, vCenter Converter 5.0 is not fully compatible with vSphere 5.1 farms and there are a number of issues.  In my own experience, a conversion is [...]

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 [...]

Automation has been a huge part of my recent learning curve.  I’ve spend a considerable amount of time working with tools to decrease my manual administration time within our VMware environment.  One tool is vCenter Orchestrator and the other is trusty old PowerCLI. In the process, I’ve found myself increasingly spending more time with PowerCLI [...]

One of the biggest hurdles for virtualization adoption in the small business area has been the need for expensive, shared storage.  The Virtual Storage Appliance is looking to change that.  By utilizing the relatively cheap, attached storage in host systems and pooling those into a storage array, vendors are looking to extend the goodness of [...]

Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform.  But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director.  Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of [...]

Today at VMworld, VMware announced the availability of version 5.1 of its infrastructure products.  New CEO Pat Gelsinger likened the release schedule of VMware’s infrastructure product to the Intel tick-tock release of a major every two years and minor revision on the year in between each major, but for a minor (tock) release, version 5.1 [...]

Update: VMware has published a KB article related to this issue.  It is available at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2018897. Several months ago, our VMware Update Manager simply stopped updating from its Shavlik repository.  It seemed to only affect Windows patches being downloaded and the VMware patches continued without any issues.  After a few months of troubleshooting with VMware support, a [...]

When I travel for work, I strive to bring back as many good ideas as I can and implement them in our IT shop.  VMworld 2011 offered the opportunity to meet a lot of people, one of those being Cody Bunch who is authoring Automating vSphere: With Vmware vCenter Orchestrator for VMware Press.  In talking [...]

I have often commented to my coworkers that VMware is facing a “good enough” problem.  Even though I believe in VMware and their software, I’ve said there is day coming soon that competing products will be “good enough” and customers will no longer see the need to buy VMware’s vSphere suite, even though it is [...]

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life.  Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for.  It means, I have a job.  Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert [...]