In order to be able to deploy vCenter Operations Manager, the ESXi host it is deployed to needs to be managed by a vCenter. At first glance, that seems like a fair and pretty straight forward requirement, right? But, is it?
While I can see the need for a vCenter in the environment that vCenter Operations Manager is supposed to monitor, I don´t understand why the host you want to deploy the vApp on has to be managed by a vCenter instance as well?
vOPS 6.3 Environment Explorer
Yesterday fellow vExpert Mattias Sundling gave me a little pre-release briefing of the new Dell/VKernel vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 release.
While I don´t normally do press release posts like these, I´m willing to make an exception in this case.
Not only is vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 available in a free version, with the familiar tools from previous versions, the new release also comes armed with a couple of new interesting tools in the suite:
Christopher Kusek, who runs pkguild.com, has just announced that he is running a contest where you can win a VMware Workstation 9 license.
Seeing that announcement, and the fact that Christopher was nice enough to mention both me and vNinja.net in it, I have decided to also give away a license that has been lingering unused in my possession way to long.
Instead of running my own contest, my license has been added to the existing contest so head on over there to read all the details.
One of the smaller improvements in vSphere 5 was the introduction of the “Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed” configuration alert if vSphere determines that there are orphaned snapshots for a given VM.
Previous versions does not show this warning message, and datastore usage could potentially skyrocket for no apparent reason if something continues to create snapshots that are not properly cleaned up when they are no longer in use. Unless there is active space monitoring for your datastores, and there should be, it could go on unnoticed for some time.
A little while ago VMware announced Project Nee, something I was, and still am, pretty excited about.
This afternoon I finally got access to the Hands-on Labs Online Beta part of Project Nee, and I have to say, this looks incredibly promising and useful.
At the moment, the available labs are:
Cloud Infrastructure: #
HOL-INF-02 - Explore vSphere 5.1 Distributed Switch (vDS) New Features This lab explores the new features of the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).
VMware vSphere Health Check is a service provided by VMware Professional Services, either by their own consultants or by a consultant from a VMware Certified Solution Provider.
I´m lucky enough to be employed by a Premier VMware Solution Provider who offers this service to our customers, and I´ve completed a fair number of these health checks in the last couple of months.
You might ask what the value of the Health Check is, and for the end customer it´s pretty clear cut. They get a very detailed report on the current status of their vSphere infrastructure, complete with action items and concise recommendations for improvements. Of course, I sell these service professionally and therefore I´m biased by default.
The new vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 is now generally available, and one of many improvements from v5.5 is the new licensing scheme.
The new foundation edition, is the new entry-level edition which from now on is included in every licensed vSphere edition free of charge. That´s right, you can now run vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 Foundation without purchasing any additional licenses.
vCenter Operations Manager now comes in the following flavors:
One of my clients has recently been having issues with their storage solution, and wanted to export the events from vCenter that show storage performance degradation, to aid in troubleshooting with the vendor.
For some reason, and I have yet to confirm that this is a bug with the vCenter 5.0 appliance or the vCenter Desktop Client, when an event export is done, the storage related events are not exported with the rest of the events.
What is VIP VCP Club? #
This a new concept by VMware Norway, for certified VMware professionals, where the idea is to gather local certified VMware Professionals for a day of hands-on labs, specialized technical sessions and general community building.
Agenda #
- Storage/HA/DR/Clustering Presented by Lee Dilworth
- End User Computing Presented by Joel Lindberg
- vCenter Operations Management Suite Presented by Ulf Andreasson
The hands-on labs covered VMware Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Operations and Horizon Suite.
Post Update: As per Preetam´s comment, HP has published a customer advisory regarding the usage of install vs update.
After installing a couple of brand new HP ProLiant BL460c G8 blades with HP Smart Array P220i controllers at a customer site, I decided that I should upgrade from the VMware-ESXi-5.0.0-Update1-623860-HP-5.20.43.iso Build 623860 used to install the blades, to the latest 821926 build offered by VMware.
Normally this is a really easy process using VMware Update Manager, but since this is a new installation all the prerequisites for that are not in place just yet and I decided to use esxcli to perform the update.
About
vNinja.net is the online hub of Christian Mohn and Stine Elise Larsen.
The site primarily focuses on IT architecture and data center technologies, with a strong emphasis on virtualization and related topics.While the main content revolves around these areas, you'll also find a range of other subjects covered from time to time, reflecting the interests of authors.
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