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…
High throughput iSCSI with VMware: a multi-vendor post
One of the feeds in my RSS reader is the VMware feed. One of the posts that caught my attention was the ‘High Throughput iSCSI with VMware’
Creating portgroups with PowerShell
I must be a workaholic. I was browsing my laptop for some movie and I came across a folder with all kinds of plugins for VirtualCenter. Things like addPortgroup and other stuff. Although it’s very handy to use those plugins I like to be able…
VMware and PowerShell
I’m from the pre-WIMP era, like in pre Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointers. There wasn’t anything like a graphical user interface. Even when they emerged like Norton Commander and PC Tools I still did most of my work from the commandline. Stuff like 4DOS enriched my…
Cisco and VMware networking
Looking for information about iSCSI, Cisco and VMware I stumbled onto a document which I want to share with all of you. Want to know about vswitches, portgroups, security, ether channels, scalability, security, performance, VLAN tagging, N-port ID virtualization, iSCSI implementations? In ‘VMware Infrastructure 3…