During a VDI pilot you really need to gather some real-world stats on how your client VMs are performing. People generally underestimate the workload VDI can put on a SAN. Thankfully if you are using vSphere 4.x, you can easily pull the stats with a short PowerShell script. I took...
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...
Lately I've been working on our Server 2008 R2 vSphere 4.1 template and ran into an interesting issue. During the template build process we rename the Administrator and Guest accounts, to comply with best practices. However, after vCenter executed the customization specification the accounts got reset back to Administrator and Guest....
With the release of ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1, VMware has greatly increased the performance of vCenter. I accidentally stumbled upon this VMware document called VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices.It's a great read covering benchmark performance differences between vCenter 4.0 and vCenter 4.1, plus a lot of tips...
Back in the days of vCenter 4.0 it required a 32-bit DSN to connect to your SQL database. Now that vCenter 4.1 and ESX 4.1 are out, it now requires the use of a 64-bit DSN. This makes sense as vCenter now requires a 64-bit server. The PowerShell script I...
With leaks starting to grow about next release of ESX(i), v4.1 is now out the door! It is a big upgrade and include a lot of new goodies for people. Below is a small sampling of the changes in 4.1:- VMware now made it obvious ESX is dying and everyone...
When VMware released ESX(i) 4.0 U1, they officially supported booting your OS drive from a paravirtual SCSI controller. Prior to U1 you could only use one of their other SCSI controllers such as BusLogic. However, when you try and install Windows with a PVSCSI controller it will not detect any...
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...
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...
I stumbled upon this technical note from VMware on how to install vCenter and the vSphere client silently via the command line. Unfortunately the syntax is pretty convoluted, unlike the SQL 2008 unattended method. The vCenter command line install document can be found here.Just to give you a flavor of...