This coming tuesday the first ever Veeam Webinar held in Norwegian will be held by yours truly. Feel free to sign up now and listen to me speak for an hour or so. Also, Veeam is continuing it´s support of the virtualization community and is yet again offering free 180-days Veeam Backup Management Suite v7 NFR licenses for VMware and Hyper-V. Note that this offer is only available to anyone who is one of the following: VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
About a year and a half I go, I took the leap from running Microsoft Windows as my main operating system and switched into full “hipster mode”, i.e. switched to a Macbook Air and OS X. Simply put, “the change” was not that hard and most everything has worked without problems, and for those things that still require Microsoft Windows, well, there is VMware Fusion for that. While I´m admittedly still a novice OS X user, and not even close to mastering OS X, I´d like to share my current Slate setup.
When doing manual host upgrades, either through the direct method or via a locally placed upgrade bundle, there is a distinct lack of progress information available after running the esxcli command. Thankfully the ESXi host provides a running logfile of the upgrade process, which makes it much easier to keep track of what is going on and that the upgrade is indeed being performed. The esxupdate.log is located in /var/log, and by issuing the following command in a terminal window you can have a rolling log showing you the upgrade status and progress:
A fellow IT-professional, who works with the non-wired flavor of networking, contacted me with the following scenario: A group of users, developers in this case, have VMware Workstation installed on their laptops. This makes it easy for them to manage, test and develop their applications in a closed environment without having to install a bunch of tools/services on their centrally managed laptop environment. An excellent use case for VMware Workstation if there ever was one.
When configuring a new C7000 Blade Enclosure with a couple of FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port modules I ran into a rather annoying issue during setup. HP Virtual Connect 3.70 introduced support for Direct-Attach setups of HP 3Par StoreServ 7000 storage systems, where you can eliminate the need for dedicated FC switches. For full details, have a look at Implementing HP Virtual Connect Direct-Attach Fibre Channel with HP 3PAR StoreServ Systems. This is excellent for setups where all your hosts are HP Blades, and you have a Virtual Connect FlexFabric setup.
A lot of the scripted installation tools that VMware offers allows the usage of a central HTTP based repository for hosting the files. Today I stumbled over a little gem that might just help you create a “quick and dirty” HTTP based deployment scenario by running a simple command in your terminal. By default, this command works on any system that has Python installed on it, so OS X and Linux should be ready to go as is.
Now that VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 1 has been released I decided to do a quick and dirty upgrade of my home installation. I refuse to call it a lab these days, since it´s one singular host and all it does it contain my home domain controller… Anyway, the following procedure upgraded the host from 5.1b to 5.1U1, by downloading the upgrade directly from VMware and installing it. Make sure the host is in maintenance mode before attempting this procedure.
While building my lab environment, I ran into a situation where I wanted to have a completely sealed off networking segment that had no outside access. This is a trivial task on it`s own, just create a vSwitch with no physical NICs attached to it, and then connect the VMs to it. The VMs will then have interconnectivity, but no outside network access at all. In this particular case, I was setting up a couple of nested ESXi servers that I wanted to connect to the “outside” vCenter Appliance (VCSA).
Dell offers a Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for vSphere, and in this post I´ll highlight how to “manually” install it on a ESXi 5.1 host. I will not cover the network setup part of the equation, but rather go through the simple steps required to get the MEM installed on the hosts in question. First of all, you need to download the MEM installation package. At the time of writing, the latest version is v1.
So, what is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? As we all (should) know, that is very much a trick question. Now, consider this little non-trick question: I wonder what the avg disk size is for your virtual machine these days. I do most math with 60GB on avg, but wonder if that has changed @DuncanYB / March 28th 2013 And now, guess what? Just 16 days later, a brand new data mining tool has emerged based on that initial question.
About the author
Christian Mohn works as a Chief Technologist SDDC for Proact in Norway.
See his About page for more details, or find him on Twitter.
Sponsors
