Cisco UCS: What’s maximum number of VIFs per blade?
As one of the largest Cisco Partners in the Netherlands we do a lot of Cisco UCS implementations and as the first company in the Netherlands with the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, where the place in the Netherlands for Cisco UCS troubleshooting. Last…
How to: Upgrade to vSphere 5
On July 12th, VMware announced the release of vSphere 5. With the release comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation. However, there are a few caveats: vSphere 5 is the first version which comes in a ESXi version ONLY! ESXi 5 is available in…
Updating VMware tools without reboot
A client was asking me if it was possible to install the VMware tools inside VM’s without having to reboot them right after. I knew it was possible and went looking for a way on doing so. During the search I found several scripts made…
Connect ISO to VM the PowerCLI way
I recently bought a new server for my home lab, or at least, it was the start of my home lab. After my ESX host crashed two years ago I didn’t took the time to rebuild it. As I started to rebuild every single VM…
Dutch VMUG: PowerCLI is for administrators!
Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf did a great presentation on PowerCLI. PowerCLI is based on PowerShell. PowerShell is designed by Microsoft with the SysAdmin in mind. It’s the universal language for Windows data centers. Most of the time GUI interfaces are single purpose and rigid….
Challenge: vCenter, EVC and Distributed Virtual switches.
Yesterday a colleague asked me to add four blades from our old test environment to our new VMware vSphere 4.1 test environment. Of course this was no problem (yet), I had an hour or two to spare, so I started immediately. Download the ESXi 4.1…
Keeping your infrastructure up to date
As with most products you want to keep them up to date for several reasons, which can include security, availability, reliability or even new features in the product. Keeping products up to date is a process that keeps repeating itself and needs a good plan to keep up with the…
How to: Upgrade to VMware View 4.5
With the release of VMware View 4.5 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. The upgrade is not that difficult but because I promised you all a ‘How to upgrade to VMware View 4.5‘ I will provide this service anyway….
Updating ESX hosts with FT enabled VM’s
Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was…
Yet another experience posting: Citrix XenDesktop 4 Express – part 1
Two months ago, I heard Citrix was giving away a free VDI version called XenDesktop Express for a maximum of 10 users. The general idea is that you can experience the Citrix product advantages without investing anything but time and hardware. I downloaded it but…
Hot adding or removing a Cisco 3750 from a stack
When using a Cisco 3750 stack connected through stackwise technology you can add or remove a Cisco switch while the stack stays on. If you are adding or removing a switch from the stack, it is very important that the switch is turned OFF. The…
Virtualise Microsoft Exchange: Can you really?
As Microsoft Exchange server is one of my area’s of expertise (or so they keep telling me :) ) I have had numerous discussions in the past whether you should virtualize Exchange or not. For ages Microsoft has claimed it cannot be done, performance would…
Upgrading VMware ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 (vSphere)
Yesterday we did an upgrade from an ESX 3.5 host to ESX 4.0 using the VMware Upgrade Manager. I must say it’s cool to see how you can upgrade your ESX hosts and after that you can schedule the updates for your virtual machines with…
VMware View advanced networking
The last few months I have been busy designing, building and testing a new VMware View solution for our own Support Center. In this Support Center we do support and system administration for some of our biggest clients. One of the challenges is the use…
Citrix tuning when running on VMware
After making a P2V of a couple of physical Citrix servers at a client, Anne Jan and I did some tuning for the best performance. Since the servers were on old hardware they now are already faster, but we wanted to get the most out…