How to create a mobile lab with VMware Fusion
I am going to setup a mobile lab on my MacBook Pro with the help of VMware Fusion 12 so I can run some ESXi servers with nested virtualization. This way I will have a lab I can carry around with me on my travels…
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…
Getting a list of VDS Portgroups from the vCenter Database
Disclaimer: this is not something for production environments (at least, I hope for your sake, GSS should be able to fix it), but more for test or homelab environments. Say your vCenter is broken. And I mean really really broken to the point where you…
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…
Removing the VMware NSX Solution from vCenter
If you want to remove VMware NSX from your vSphere environment, it’s as simple as reversing the installation steps (remove logical network configuration, remove NSX Service VMs, remove the NSX VIBs from the ESXi hosts and remove the NSX Manager). NSX is completely managed through…
VMware released Update 1 for vSphere 6 and much much more
Last week VMware released Update 1 for vSphere 6. But that was not the only update that was released. There was a real wave of updates for a whole range of products. Here’s recap of the updates that were published. Sit tight because it’s a…
VMware NSX 6.2: Support for Multiple vCenters
VMware NSX 6.2 dropped yesterday with some pretty awesome features. I’ll be going through most features in separate posts and this one is for the Cross-vCenter feature. Before 6.2, the NSX Manager and vCenter had a one to one relationship, making certain dual datacenter designs…
How to install Micro Segmentation on your vSphere cluster – a Step-by-step guide
Micro segmentation is probably the number one reason for companies with vSphere to purchase NSX. This feature inserts a packet filter in between your VMs. A filter you can configure centrally, link to single VMs, groups of VMs, kinds of VMs and specify according to your…
vCenter availability with SMP-FT?
In june of 2014 VMware announced that vCenter Heartbeat would be discontinued. The product would not be available for purchase, support will remain until september 19 of 2018. VMware has chosen to readdress availability options to protect vCenter Server from outages based on internal availability solution…
vCenter Server: Installable versus Appliance
vCenter Server: Installable versus Appliance. Often when designing an infrastructure there is a choice to be made between the two options. Go for the easy and fast to deploy appliance or go for the scalable and flexible installation. Where with the previous version of ESX…
Multi-hypervisor management with VMware vCenter
Shortly after the release of vCenter 5.1, VMware released “vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0”. With this product you as an administrator are able to manage third party hypervisors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V from within your vCenter installment. This will give companies more flexibility over what hypervisors they are…
vCenter Operations Manager for View
VMware is rapidly expanding the possibilities of their new management suite VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) with their recent release of VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View. This new addition provides end-to-end visibility into the health, performance and efficiency of a VMware View virtual desktop…
Orchestrator plugin for Active Directory released
Last Friday VMware released the Orchestrator plugin for Active Directory v1.0. With the plugin it is possible to manage Active Directory objects straight from within Orchestrator. For those of you that don’t know what VMware Orchestrator is: VMware vCenter Orchestrator provides out of the box…
Determining VMware vCenter Server and ESX Build Number (updated)
I have just updated the list after receiving word the new version is out and the build numbers are known for vSphere 4 and vCenter Server. So I compiled a list of build numbers and updates from the patch notes for VMware ESX and VMware…
vCenter vs VDI?
It sounds a bit strange, ‘vCenter vs VDI‘, as both are VMware products but it’s true. As usual a twitter contact pointed me to a VMware KB article which states the following. ‘VirtualCenter tasks that conflict with VMware Virtual Desktop functionality‘ My first thought was…