Not that WSUS is expensive, after all it’s a “free” addon to the server you’re already running if you need it. Of course, running your own Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) infrastructure is preferable in just about every scenario except for some edge cases where bandwidth or latency issues might prevent you from syncing the updates from a central repository. Sadly, these edge cases enter the fray from time to time and I recently found myself in the middle of such a scenario.
To celebrate vSphere 5 GA release today, I’ve recorded a quick video of the old school CD/ISO based installation: vSphere 5 ESXi Install Video from Christian Mohn on Vimeo. Seems strangely familiar, right? Enjoy!
The up and coming release of VMware vSphere 5 comes with an upgraded versjon of the VMware vStorage VMFS volume file system. One of the problems with VMFS-3 an earlier is that the block size you define when you format the datastore, determines the maximum size of the VMDK files stored on it. This means that when planning your datastore infrastructure you must have an idea on how large your VMDK files will potentially be during the lifecycle of the datastore.
No, this is not a farewell post, but rather the opposite. It’s Dr John Troyer’s birthday! John lives and breathes his role, as Senior Social Media Strategist at VMware, and I have to say that one of the most brilliant moves VMware has done is to employ John in his current role. Lots of other corporation employ marketing people in their social media roles, VMware went the other way and put the very technically savvy Dr.
Recently at the office I was given the task to test out some SMB NAS products to use as potential candidates for some of our small branch offices all over the world. I did many tests relating from backup and replication to actually running VMs on them and pounding them with IOmeter. What I will share with you in this series of posts is my vSphere/IOmeter tests for NFS and iSCSI.
As many of you did I watched todays Cloud Infrastructure Forum and the release of vSphere 5 today. I was very excited with many of the features such as Storage Profiling, Storage DRS, VMFS 5 release, and they have blown the top off of the resource limits on VMs to create Monster VMs - just to mention a few. However, one topic I notice causing quite a stir is the new licensing that seemed to be very briefly mentioned at the end of the webinar.
July 12, 2011 9am-Noon Pacific Time: Join this online event, and get all the details on “the next generation of cloud infrastructure”! VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod will be presenting on the next generation of cloud infrastructure. Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing. 9:00-9:45 Paul and Steve present - live online streaming 10:00-12:00 three tracks of deep dive breakout sessions
Setting Up Automated ESXi Deployments
automation ESXi fun Ops PowerCLI Powershell realworld Virtualization VMware
Automating ESXi installs was made much easier after the release of vSphere 4.1 where the Scripted Install feature was added, and by using VMware Auto Deploy from VMware Labs. VMware Auto Deploy requires that you have vCenter and Host Profiles in your environment, and that again requires that you have Enterprise Plus licenses in your environment. It is, however, possible to deploy ESXi in an automated fashion completely without vCenter and Host Profiles!
Let me start this post out with a little story. I am normally a hardcore virtualization and storage guy. Sometimes my career in this sector brings me into working with stuff I haven’t worked with before because virtualization encompasses so much. As I continue to work with other teams I learn more and more about what they do everyday. I usually find myself involved in every performance troubleshooting session and every new project these days.
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