Posts Tagged ‘vSphere’

Older Entries

Getting started with vCenter Orchestrator

10, Nov 2011

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 [...]

A problem for VMware: If it’s “good enough” then why pay more?

24, Oct 2011

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 [...]

Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems

13, Aug 2011

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 [...]

Finally bought a Drobo for home

14, Jun 2010

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 [...]

Monitoring challenges moving critical systems in virtual infrastructure

3, Jun 2010

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 [...]

Path failures on ESX4 with HP storage

8, Apr 2010

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 [...]

vNetwork Distributed Switch challenges

8, Apr 2010

Among the new technologies introduced with ESX4, I’m particuarly inpressed with the vNetwork Distributed Switch.  We have chosen to slowly introduce the dvSwitches into our environment and transition VM’s over to these switches.  The distributed switch allows us some new capabilities such as centralized management, individual port assignments, retained state after vMotions, port statistics and [...]

Best practices for VMware ESX4 with HP EVA storage

7, Apr 2010

(For PowerCLI commands to accomplish the same best practices, see this post). HP provided us with the best practices document for ESX4 connected to an HP EVA array.  There is a major change in ESX4.  For the first time, ESX is ALUA (Asymmetric Logical Unit Access) aware.  (See this post on Yellow Bricks for more [...]

Neglect…

7, Apr 2010

Well, its a new quarter and I feel a big obligation to post something to the blog.  I cannot believe it has been three months since my last post.  I have several irons in the fire, but on the work front, I am glad to report that the vSphere upgrade has been completed and we [...]

Lessons learned from initial rollout of ESX4

21, Dec 2009

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. 


Older Entries
top