How to upgrade vCenter server appliance to 6.5
I know that vSphere 6.5 is out for some time now, but I did not got to upgrading my own homelab up until last week. So last week I started the upgrade and I ran into two situations in wich I had to do a…
Building a cheap alternative for CrashPlan for Home
I use CrashPlan Home for all my off-site backups of my client devices. It’s a pretty neat and usable backup client which works on Mac OS, Linux and Windows. From the client you can restore individual files and it runs as a service for continuous…
The end of vCenter for Windows. Why invest time now?
As many of you probably know vCenter for Windows will be deprecated with the next major release. This means you still have time before you have no choice but to upgrade to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). But why wait with upgrading? If the technical benefits that the…
vROPS Tenant App for vCloud Director
Earlier today Erik pointed me to something I totally missed: vROPS Tenant App for VCD. It’s already out there for a month! You probably guessed what is is, since the name gives a lot of clues: It is a tenant app that you can use…
vRealize Business for Cloud report scheduling
One of the many new cool features of VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 is report scheduling. You can now schedule and email a custom report or the out-of-the-box reports to a set of recipients on daily, weekly or monthly basis. In this post I will…
VMworld – Making the most of your time
VMworld Europe is next week! This is always the highlight of my year, mostly for 2 reasons: 1) all kinds of awesome new virtualization technology is either announced or released, and reason 2) my favorite; the best minds of the virtualization community gather and share…
Editing uneditable VMs in vCenter
Certain service appliances cannot be edited manually inside vCenter. For instance, VMware NSX Edge appliances are an example of such service appliances. These VMs are managed by the NSX Manager and you shouldn’t change their configuration manually. Normally. ;-) But sometimes you need to edit…
vRealize Log Insight: Internal vs External Load Balancer
Most of the times when talking about high availability or scaling a product like vRealize Log Insight is easily forgotten. This is a shame, especially since vRealize Log Insight is so easy to setup as a cluster with load balancing capabilities. You might wonder why it…
VMware mobile apps: Getting more out of your infrastructure
While I was at a customers location I noticed an app that I completely forgot: vSphere Mobile Watchlist, a tool that allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. I wondered which mobile apps I forgot as well…
Monitor hybrid, multi-cloud architectures with the new Microsoft Azure Management Pack for vROPS
Digital transformation is accelerating as more and more enterprises work to create and innovate by taking advantage of cloud. Research shows that in the near future, over 90% of enterprises plan to use hybrid, multi-cloud architectures to provide the type of cost, effective, flexibility and…
5 Tips for Infrastructure Hardening
While compiling this blog post last couple of weeks this weekend all hell broke loose! A large-scale ransomware attack was launched against users of any Windows system worldwide. Showing us that security is all about a pre-care balance between protection and usability. Running your infrastructure in…
Why Upgrade to ESX 6.x? Snapshot handling!
A lot of organisations are still on older versions of VMware vSphere. I see ESXi deployments in the field which run on version 4.1, 5.0 and 5.5 regularly. When I ask them why they do not upgrade, I get all sorts of answers. The most…
Correctly sizing your VMware infrastructure
A lot as been writting about sizing VMware environments. There are various opinions and ideas, like: Use the reference guide or architecture, then you’re safe Follow the sizing guides from the vendors you need to monitor the current workloads to correctly size your environment. Do…
How to run Containers as a Service – Part 2
In ‘How to run Containers as a Service – Part 1‘ I talked about how easy it is to run containers in a development environment and the difficulty of moving containers into production. In this post I will show you how to run Containers as a Service by…
How to run Containers as a Service – Part 1
In this post I will talk about containers, why developers love them and which platform is suitable to manage and run Containers in production. For those not in the know, application containers are a way for developers to package code into executable ‘containers’. Instead of…
