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...
I ran across a useful command that instantly reassigns a drive to another letter, and another one liner that detects a CD-ROM and assigns it a particular letter. For additional details and a richer script, check out this blog post from The Admin Guy. The piece that I found most...
VMware just released a killer whitepaper on how to optmize SQL 2008 performance for vCenter 4.0. It has quite a few details that I was not aware of and will result in changes to my production environment. Tips that were new to me included:- Optimizing the clustered index fill factor-...
Ok so I'm a bit tardy in this notification, but VMware released a new version of the Ethernet driver for the 10Gbps NIC that's in the HP BL490c G6 servers, and other brands as well. Technically the update is for Broadcom NetExtreme II BCM57710/BCM57711/BCM57711E NICs. In HP terms this is...
A co-worker of mine, Mark, turned me on to this company called QNAP. They make a really dizzying array of SOHO and small/medium business "NetApp" like NAS devices. These little babies support a wide range of protocols including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, ftp, etc. It's really amazing what these critters can...
Last week I was listening to a HP video where the HP CTO said that Fibre Channel drives will cease to exist in the coming years. Instead, enterprise storage disk arrays will be configured with two tiers of storage: SSD and SATA. I thought for a minute, and this made...
Hot off the press! Last night VMware posted critical updates to vSphere 4.0. You can find the patches here. If you want to read the release notes, they are available here. Patches apply to both ESX and ESXi hosts.This does not appear to be Update 2, which was rumored to...
Back in January I wrote a blog about emerging Ethernet standards that are converging Ethernet, Fibre Channel and virtualization. During one of HP's recent tech days they had a session on all of these new standards, their ratification status, and how they will apply to HP products. Even if you...