Microsoft SCM can be a great tool for configuring and maintaining security baselines for various Microsoft products such as Windows operating systems, Exchange, IE and Office. In the past I've used it to establish golden OS security baselines that then get exported and baked into our VM templates and physical...
VMware just released Workstation 8.0.2, up from 8.0.1. This is not a major release, but has a few enhancements: Ubuntu 11.10 is supported as a host. Fedora 16 is supported as a guest. Fixed bugs include: The ACLs on the PID files needed improvement. VMware thanks Inode0 for bringing this...
Veeam is once again running a Christmas special where you can get a free NFR (not for resale) Veeam Backup 6.0 license key for 2 sockets which is good for 1 year. You can select VMware, Hyper-V, or both. All you need to do is fill out this form and wait for...
VMware UMDS (Update Manager Download Service) is a product which ships with vCenter that allows you to download patches for VUM, then use them in air-gapped networks where VUM can't directly download updates from the internet. UMDS 5.0 has some nice enhancements from 4.x, which helps limit the amount of...
Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is...
When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as...
Sometimes you may want to install the various vSphere utilities (PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, vSphere Client, and VUM PowerCLI) to non-default directories, or use a silent/unattended installation to automate the process.Below are four batch files that you can run which will install the respective tool to the custom installation directory specified....
For those of you that want easy access to vSphere 5.0 documentation, I stumbled upon a location that has well organized PDF and e-book resources. No more need to search all over VMware's site for a specific piece of documentation. You can check out the link here.
I finally managed to get into a session by one of the VMware rockstars, Frank Denneman, who has co-authored several books that I highly recommend. Frank stated this topic could be a four day class alone, and this was just an hour, so it went quite quickly and just scratched...
This session focused on the Cisco distributed virtual switch, the Nexus 1000v. The speaker was very knowledgeable and a great presenter. Lots of great details, but as fast as he was going I didn't get all of the details. You can check out the his blog at jasonnash.com.Highlights: The VSM...
Today while I was walking around the vendor expo at VMworld 2011, I saw a very interesting product from Cisco. I was familiar with the datacenter UCS product, but a mini version caught my attention. Called UCS Express this is a micro ESXi server that slides directly into their ISR G2...
vCenter is a business critical service that when it goes down can cause substantial chaos, although VMs will happily keep running while it is down. Using VDI? Forget spinning up new VMs, or rebooting VMs. Using vCD? Forget doing anything while it's down. HA? Yes that will keep working (for...