This week I'm at TechED 2010 in New Orleans, and as part of the conference package I signed up for a pre-conference session on Exchange Server 2010. This was an eight hour session on Sunday covering a whole gamut of Exchange 2010 topics. The two presenters actually wrote a book,...
For those of you using ESXi 4.0 on HP servers, be sure to check out their new CIM providers. The CIM providers communicate hardware health status to the ESXi host and in turn, to vCenter. You can then configure alerts in vCenter to warn you of hardware health problems.The new...
A few days ago Cisco released a new version of their virtual Nexus 1000v switch, version 4.0(4)SV1(3). You can read the release notes here. Major new features include:- GUI configuration setup which creates VMware port groups, VLANs, turns on SSH, adds the plug-in to vCenter, and other nifty things.- ERSPAN...
A few weeks ago HP released a major update to their onboard administrator, the brains behind the HP C-Class chassis. Previously all of the iLOs (lights-out remote management processor) and all of the interconnect modules needed to be on the same VLAN. If a single chassis had both test/dev and...
HP really makes it hard to find all of the relevant documentation for their various products. But tonight I stumbled upon a link for all of their BladeSystem documentation. It has quick specs, customer advisories, support docs, quick install docs, and user guides. A cornucopia of documentation for geeky people!It...
A few weeks ago Cisco revised their release notes for the Nexus 1000v 4.0(4)SV1(2) version. This is not a new version of the 1000v VSM appliance, just updated documentation. The updates clarify limitations with vMotion, VMware Lab Manager, ACL limitations, and NetFlow limitations. You can check out the new release...
For those HP customers that are using the wide variety of Insight Control products, HP and recently released updates in March and April of this year. Updates include:Insight Control Server Deployment 6.1 that includes Altiris 6.9 SP4 (April 2010)HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) 6.0 (March 2010)HP Insight Control for Microsoft...
I'm smack dab in the middle of designing a robust deployment of VMware vSphere using HP C-class blade chassis, HP Flex-10/Virtual Connect modules, and Cisco Nexus hardware and virtual switches (5000 and 1000v, respectively). This is a pretty forward leaning architecture and fairly complicated. After plowing through a ton of...
I'm pretty excited about the newly announced VMware exams. VMware had a big gap between their VCP entry level certification at the mother of all daddy certifications, the VCDX. The two new exams are:VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Enterprise AdminVMware Certified Advanced Professional - DesignHaving a VCP 4.0 is required...
Normally I wouldn't blog about a minor rev in a vendor's firmware update CD. But last week HP released a major version, with significant changes, to their Proliant firmware update CD. They've combined several of their blade offline update CDs into a single DVD that covers their ML, DL plus...
After a few months the highly anticipated vSphere 4.0 hardening guides have been released. Several months ago VMware released beta versions which I thought were pretty good. Seeing as DISA doesn't have STIGs for vSphere, the next best thing is vendor provided documentation.You can see the full release here and...
During the build process of my Windows Server 2008 R2 VM templates, I had perplexing problem with my second virtual disk after sysprep completed. In my previous blog post I showed a PowerShell command that reassigned a drive letter. Worked great, but a noticed a problem. My "D" drive, which...