For those of you with HP ProLiant servers in your environment, you know that on a quarterly basis HP releases a new "HP Service Pack for ProLiant", which is a combo ISO of firmware, drivers, and tools for your ProLiant rackmount and blade servers. It's very important to keep firmware...
Welcome to a post which will let you easily update your VMware ESXi host SSL certificates. Last year when I was writing my 15-part vSphere 5.1 installation and configuration series I didn't include instructions on how to replace the ESXi SSL certificate. That process hasn't changed for ages, so I put it...
Windows Server 2012 generation ID is a great new feature that will allow use to safely virtualize a domain controller, on specific hypervisors. One of the really great features that hypervisors have had for ages is the ability to perform snapshots, then roll back to a prior state with a click...
In a virtual environment CPU scheduling is extremely important. You very likely will have more vCPUs than pCores, so the hypervisor has to play some "tricks" to fairly schedule VMs among the finite hardware resources. With each version of vSphere VMware has tuned and optimized CPU scheduler performance. VMware design goals...
One of the absolute best tools for managing security group policy settings in a Microsoft environment is their Security Compliance Manager. Hot off the presses is version 3.0, which is a major step forward in both functionality and OS/product support. The full product announcement from Microsoft is here. The most...
If anyone has been following the release of vSphere 5.1, you know it was not exactly a smooth launch. In fact, I would dare to call it a huge debacle. To me, it seems like it was rushed out the door without having components even beta tested, like the required...
For Windows Server 2016/2019 and Windows 10, see my new post: Trusted Remote Desktop Services SSL Certs for Win10/2019 For Windows environments that want extra security, one of the features that has been around for ages is requiring TLS 1.0 for Windows RDP (Remote Desktop) connections. This functionality requires a...
In case you missed my previous blog post, yesterday VMware released vSphere 5.0 Update 2, which fixes a plethora of bugs and plugs security holes. You can find my host here, with links to the release notes for all the gory details. Right on the heels of VMware releasing 5.0...
Yesterday VMware released vSphere 5.0 Update 2. You can find the full ESXi release notes here. vCenter 5.0 Update 2 release notes are here. Highlights of Update 2 include: Full support for installing vCenter on Windows Server 2012 Full customization support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Support for...
Yesterday VMware released security and bugfix patches for both ESXi 5.0 and ESXi 5.1. It has also updated the vCenter Server Appliance to address security issues as well. For the full security bulletin, check out this link. The new build numbers are shown below:ESXi 5.0 Build 914586 (Update 2)ESXi 5.1...
VMware has released an updated version of vCenter Server, v5.1.0b. You can find the whole readme here. According to the readme, vCenter Server 5.1.0b is not a patch release. For more information you can find the release notes here. The release notes are particularly enlightening, as you can find all...
For those of you eagerly awaiting Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 RTM, you can now download it from TechNet! Dated just last week you can now download:Configuration Manager and Endpoint ProtectionData Protection ManagerVirtual Machine ManagerApp ControllerOrchestratorService ManagerThe biggest news for SP1 is full support for Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V 3.0,...