Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect port licensing explained
When you are designing a Cisco UCS Unified Computing environment you will use several components which will work together. One key object in the whole chain is the Fabric Interconnect which connects the chassis, used storage and uplinks to Datacenter Switches like the Nexus 5000…
Updated: Supported Business Applications on the VMware Platform
More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5.5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website…
How to delete an orphaned desktop pool
Time for a new problem in the VMware Horizon View series. After running into problems which forced me to ‘Manually delete protected Horizon View replicas‘ and ‘Link a VMware View desktop to its replica‘, now I encountered an orphaned desktop pool which could not be…
IBM Cognos licensing in a VMware environment
IBM makes it possible with their licensing to run IBM Cognos on a virtualisation hypervisor like VMware ESXi and make full use of vMotion, HA and DRS. Many IBM products can be licensed as User-Based or Capacity-based. If the product has a server component, it…
How to link VMware View desktop to its replica
A while back I was looking at a VMware View environment that had Storage DRS enabled and set to automatic. If I recall correctly, one of the first things the installation document from VMware mentions is not to use Storage DRS in a View enviroment….
How to upgrade to vSphere 5.5
A few weeks ago during VMworld 2013 VMware announced vSphere 5.5. We already did a ‘What’s new in vSphere 5.5‘ post but now it is actually available, so it’s time to find out how to upgrade to vSphere 5.5. But before we start, there are…
Cisco UCS: What’s the maximum bandwidth per blade?
As I already mentioned in this article, Cisco UCS is a complex combination of components. With the release of the M3 type Cisco UCS blades the number of components have increased and so did the complexity. The result is that I receive calls from colleagues/customers…
How to: Shutdown ESXi host in case of a power failure
When running a virtual infrastructure based on VMware vSphere, you have multiple techniques to create a high available environment. You can create a cluster, use VMware HA or FT but when the power fails you’re done. To buy us a little bit of time, you…
Horizon View in a stretched cluster environment: Can I have that? No!
Ever since VMware started selling View as a desktop solution, we’ve had these discussions with colleagues and customers. You probably are familiar with the topic: Many companies have more than one location, but they all want to manage their IT infrastructure as if it was…
How to license Windows 8 in a VMware Horizon View deployment
It is a common misunderstanding that, if you buy software licenses you can do anything with it. You will not become the owner of it, you only get the use right of the software under STRICT CONDITIONS. What you may or may not do with…
VMware View with FlexPod deployment guide
As a Cisco/NetApp FlexPod Partner we deploy a lot of FlexPods with all kinds of workloads. One of the more populair applications of aFlexPod is a VMware View environment. One of the tools to execute a valid and correctly configured FlexPod is a CVD, a…
VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance and Best Practices and 3D graphics
At VMGuru.nl we’ve done a lot of articles on VDI performance and best practices. Recently I’ve done an article on ‘How to improve VMware View video performance‘ and Edwin did an article on ‘Boosting Google maps and video with VMware View‘. Researching the possibilities and…
Using Serial Ports in a VMware Environment
While pursuing the 100% virtual mark you once in a while run into trouble with legacy hardware where there is hardware directly attached to the physical server you are going to virtualize. If it is USB equipment you can use USB Anywhere devices to make…
Upgrading your vCenter Server Appliance from version 5.0 to 5.1 – A Howto
VMGuru used to run on an “ESXi only” install with no extra management. It’s a single server in a data center in Amsterdam, so there never was a need for a vCenter Server. When the VMware Octopus Beta started in which we participated, the deployment…
SmartStack by Cisco, Nimble & VMware
Last week Nimble Storage announced a new reference architecture called SmartStack, with Cisco Systems and VMware for 1.000 simultaneous VDI users, requiring only 3U of rack space, for $43 for storage per desktop. A pre-configured, fully-integrated system – built around the reference architecture, which consists…
