One of the continuing pain points with VMware vSphere is the unnecessarily complicated procedure to install trusted SSL certificates in ESXi, vCenter and VUM. Up until 4.1 Update 1 (released 2/10/11), VMware had no public procedures to update the VUM SSL certificate, over 1.5 years after vSphere 4.0 hit the streets. Plus...
Some backup software manufacturers are offering a capacity based licensing model, instead of a agent based model. Depending on your situation, this may be a dramatically easier and cheaper licensing model. Traditionally you had to buy per-server licenses, per-agent licenses, per-library licenses, and maybe other options as well. Backup software...
Over the last couple of days I've been performing ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 build 320137 upgrades. During the upgrade process today one of my servers had a hiccup and the web services was not responding. After a couple of reboots and non-responsive web services I iLO'd in (it's an HP...
During my testing of Citrix XenDesktop 5 I ran across yet another bug, which set me back in my testing. Apparently if the VM template that you want machine creation services (MCS) to use has been configured with the VMware pvscsi controller, creating the VMs will fail when you generate a...
I like to perform unattended installations of my operating systems, like Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 using autounattend.xml so that requires that the image have the required drivers to recognize critical devices like mass storage hardware. One of the performance optimizations that I always include in our Windows...
Historically VMware has not used the strongest hashing algorithms to store root passwords on ESXi or ESX hosts. And to make matters worse, ESX/i 4.1 had a major security hole that was open for over four months, which you can read about here. The short story is that ROOT passwords...
Yesterday I stumbled upon a blog post about a free Microsoft security tool. No matter how secure you think your system is, it can always be more secure. So I eagerly read Ed Bott's article about Microsoft's EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit). I quickly installed it, configured it for maximum...
Virtualization has taken off like wild fire, and now organizations are in the process of virtualizing tier-1 applications like Exchange 2010. However, sizing and designing Exchange 2010 for a virtualized environment requires some additional care and thought versus a traditional physical server deployment. Critical sizing requirements like memory, vCPUs, and...
Update 2/11/2011: VMware has re-published the article and limited the applicability to 4.1 U1 (released 2/10/2011), since it directs you to use the new VMware Update Manager Utility. The new procedure is easier to follow and uses a new tool that makes it debut in 4.1 U1. However, IMHO, it's...
Last week Citrix XenDesktop 5.0 was released, which I was eagerly anticipating since XD 4.0 had a number of warts which made it unusable for the environment I support. XD5 was supposed to fix all of the show stoppers, so the day it was released I downloaded the HUGE 18GB...
Veeam is offering free, permanent, licenses for Backup and Replication v5 and Veeam Monitor Plus with Business View. These are NFR (not for resale) licenses, and limited to two sockets. But it's great for a home lab, demo, training, etc. I don't know how long the deal is good for,...
Back in 2009 I wrote a blog about the possibility of Microsoft supporting two-factor or multi-factor authentication for some Exchange services. For organizations which require high security, such as the DoD, allowing external access to email requires additional protection. With Exchange 2007 and prior versions there was no easy way...