CloudCamp is once again making an appearance on these shores.

What is CloudCamp? Read the rest of this entry »

You may or may not have heard that the vSphere-Land.com Top Bloggers in VMware and Virtualization Award nominations have been released and voting has commenced.

I'm both pleased and honoured to have my Blog on the shortlist amongst some of the worlds top Virtualization Bloggers.

So if your a regular reader of the various Virtualization Blogs, it would be great if you could vote for your favourites.

For more information visit www.vsphere-land.com

VMware have made an announcement on their Certification Portal which you may be interested in if you planned on taking the VCP410 exam but found that your local Pearson Vue test center was full.

Notice: Due to overwhelming demand, existing VCP3 professionals will be able to obtain the VCP4 certification with no additional course requirement through January 31st, 2010

The 2nd Shot retake, to participate you must enrol prior to taking your first attempt and no later than January 15th, 2010.

Click here to enroll in the 2nd Shot Program. Vouchers will only be sent to those who have completed the prerequisites for VCP4 (see below). Please direct any questions about this program to certification@vmware.com.  You must take your first exam on or before January 22nd to allow for the 7 day wait between attempts.

Visit www.PearsonVUE.com/VMware/Upgrade for the full list of participation instructions. If you have previously enrolled in the 2nd Shot Program and already received your voucher, the expiration has been automatically extended.

The vSphere 4 Reference Card is a must for anyone who is looking to take their VCP410 Exam and for anyone who regularly works with vSphere 4.

The Reference Card contains a vast amount of information ranging from Partition sizes for installing ESX to the Ports used by the VMware Infrastructure Client.

Below is a list of changes added to this new version.

Read the rest of this entry »

It's a little like MTV, but without the Scantily Clad ladies…. Maybe it's something VMware could implement?

Our new video KB articles have been received so well by our customers that we have created a new blog just for video content.  The videos are great for how-to types of topics, or for doing white-board chats. Some folks are just happier having something shown to them rather than having to read through pages of steps.

Bookmark it guys..http://blogs.vmware.com/kbtv/

Have you ever been looking into an issue in vCenter only to find that the time the issue happened has just dropped off of the bottom of the Tasks or Events lists? Well that's happened to me a few times.

I've just come across something in the VMware Infrastructure Client which I didn't know existed.. and I've been using the VIC for what like seems forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

I've been asked to take a look into the Hot-Add Memory and CPU features which are available with vSphere 4. The concept seems pretty useful and straight forward, but what isn't is the list of Operating Systems that support these features. There doesn't seem to be a definitive list. Either that, or I should have gone to Specsavers?

I've had a look around and I can find two KB articles from VMware: Here, and Here which talk about using Hot-Add on Linux OS's. Another VMware document focused on Microsoft: VMware Guest/Host OS Compatibility Guide There is Jason Boche's great article which he researched and tested himself, And Daniel Eason's summary on Hot-Add.

From these different articles I have taken all of the information and produced the following table which in theory should be all of the OS's which support VMware Hot-Add Memory/CPU.

Read the rest of this entry »

VMware have just released a new KB article 1003490 which focuses on restarting the Management agents on both ESX and ESXi Hosts from Version 3 through to Version 4.

Restarting the management agents on Hosts is often used when you are unable to connect your ESX/ESXi Hosts to vCenter or you can’t connect directly to your Hosts using the VMware Infrastructure Client.

The KB Article explains other symptoms which can be resolved by restarting the agents, it also be contains two video’s, one for ESX and one for ESXi (Shown below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, QLogic announced that its 2nd Generation, Single Chip, 8100 Series 10Gb Converged Network Adapters are now certified by VMware for ESX/ESXi 4.0. This is key because a number of end users have been waiting for VMware to announce certification for 2nd Generation CNAs since QLogic announced the industry’s first 2nd Gen CNAs in March 2009 with support for only Windows/Linux.  EMC, IBM, and NetApp are already supporting the 8100 Series CNAs today. The combination of QLogic second generation CNAs with VMware vSphere 4 enables customers to attain a higher degree of data center efficiency — an Intelligent Converged Data Center.

The 8100 Series 2nd Gen CNAs are the first 2nd Gen CNAs to be listed on the vSphere 4 HCL. This is key because the 2nd Gen CNAs (in comparison to currently shipping 1st Gen CNAs in the market) offer:

• 150% higher FCoE performance
• 1/3 the power consumption
• Standard PCI Express form factor which enables the adapter to be deployed in any leading rack/tower servers with PCIe x8 or larger slot. Current Gen 1 CNAs are compatible only with a limited set of server models due to its large size.
• Compatible with the latest released standards for FCoE

Below is the URL with more details on the new certification.

http://ir.qlogic.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=85695&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=1358476

Connect-VIServer -Server <vCenter Server>
$AllHosts = Get-Cluster <Cluster Name>
foreach ($ESXHost in ($AllHosts | Get-VMHost))
{
 Get-VMHost $ESXHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -Name <vSwitch Number> | New-VirtualPortGroup -Name
<Virtual PortGroup Name> -VLanId <VLan ID>
}
Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false