Quite unexpectedly tonight I got an email from VMware telling me that I've been designated a VMware vExpert 2012. According to the welcome e-mail:You’ve done work above and beyond, helping others succeed with VMware, and we here in the Social Media and Communities team are delighted to welcome you to...
UPDATE 2 5/15/2012: Looks like VMware/Cisco pulled the 5.0 U1 custom ISO installation media. So follow my blog post below to create your own. UPDATE 1 4/23/12: Cisco released a customized vSphere 5.0 U1 installation ISO with all of their latest drivers. You can download it here under OEM Customized Installer...
If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to install Windows on a physical server, you will quickly realize not all of the needed drivers are baked into Windows. While Cisco does provide small ISO files for various drivers you can mount during the installation process, it requires manual...
So this is an interesting announcement....I would not have guessed that IBM would market a distributed virtual switch for the vSphere 5.0 platform. When I think of networking gear IBM is not a brand that springs to mind. They did acquire BNT a little while back, but that was blade...
Last week there was a leak regarding HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, but today the entire cat is officially out of the bag. The cat really should be a tiger, the changes are so significant. G7 servers were fairly incremental improvements over G6, with only a few minor changes. Gen8 appears to me...
One of the challenges with managing a lot of virtualized HP servers is firmware updates. Unlike Windows or Linux hosts where you can perform relatively simple on-line updates, ESX(i) hosts must be done offline. Traditionally you boot from the HP Firmware DVD and apply the updates. The update process was...
For those of you that have a VMware VCP4 and want to take the VCP5 exam without additional classroom training requirements, your time is short! February 29th, 2012 is the last day you can take upgrade exam. For some good study material, I recommend the vSphere Resource Kit site. It...
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...