On rare occasions you may need to downgrade your ESXi host. In my case I was working on a VMware certification test and my host was using a newer build than what was called for. Or, maybe you run into a situation like the NFS bug earlier this year and needed to...
This weekend I did a minor update to my VMware vSphere 5.5 SSL Toolkit script. It's now at v1.59. I updated the OpenSSL download to use 0.9.8.zb, and also added a primitive PowerShell 3.0 check. PowerShell 3.0 and higher has always been required, but now I try and check for...
Securing your Windows computer (both client and server) should be a top priority in your organization. To that end Microsoft just released EMET 5.0. It's not a matter of IF, but WHEN you will have a security breach. But the trick is to raise the security bar to make it...
A few days ago VMware released a minor update to vCenter to bring it up to vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1c. The update applies to both the Windows and vCenter Server appliance deployment models. If you are using vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), then you will want this update. Update 1c...
Quite a while ago VMware released a VDI optimization tool that was aimed at Windows 7 use cases. This optimization tool tweaked a lot of settings to help reduce IOPS in a VDI environment. It was quite handy, and I used it for my VDI deployments. Now VMware has updated the tool...
Earlier this year I had the distinct pleasure of working with Luca Dell'oca (@Dellock6) from Veeam on a Nutanix + Veeam Backup and Replication + VMware vSphere whitepaper. You can check out that post and whitepaper here. Now, just a few months later, we've collaborated on a Nutanix + Veeam + Hyper-V...
With all of the recent newly minted VCDXs I thought I would start compiling a list of resources for those aspiring to become a VMware VCDX. This will be a living page, which hopefully will have links added as people make me aware of new content on the web. There's always...
As many of you know, one of my passions throughout my IT career has been security. Having worked in the Federal Government space for most of my career, making sure solutions are secure is always a top priority. Securing your VMware infrastructure is very important, and one of the primary...
Hot off the Citrix presses is a very thorough solution design document, called Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 on Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. Whew, that's a quite a mouthful. What is it? It's a document, nearly 100 pages long, detailing how to deploy both Citrix VDI...
This is part 2 of the VSS Labs vCert Manager installation and configuration series. In Part 1 we got vCert Manager installed, and secured with a trusted SSL certificate. In this section we will get into the nuts and bolts configuration and start replacing certificates. vCert Manager Configuration 1. First...
Last August I wrote a blog post about this great new VMware SSL tool by VSS Labs called vCert Manager, which replaces many of your VMware SSL certificates all from the comfort of a nice GUI. It's a full certificate lifecycle management tool for VMware vSphere and related components. For...
Since joining Nutanix I've had the opportunity to get exposed to Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, as our platform supports the three most common hypervisors: VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, and KVM. I'm now embarking on writing some Hyper-V guides for Nutanix, and wanted a way to leverage my existing ESXi 5.5 Nutanix...