Hi guys, just a quick post to remind you that the next vBeers will be help this Thursday, October 7th.
When & Where
The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.
It's written by a guy from VMware called Horst Mundt who is from Germany. Get it, Read it. It's really really useful. I've always wanted to be able to create my own custom alarm's in vCenter but I've never really fully had the capabilities to do it. Now with the release of vSphere 4.1 I can.
Since starting at VMware I've spoken to a lot of people who've told me they have problems finding good VMware best practice documentation for HDS Storage. I was fortunate enough to attend the HDS Bloggers Day back in April, at which I met some great people and made some good contacts. I've been in touch with them and spoken to them about my colleagues views on the lack of good HDS documentation relating to vSphere and they pointed me to the following website:
Over the past few days I've been looking into deployment tools to help me deploy a large amount of ESXi Host's in a short space of time. One of the tools I've been looking at is VMware Auto Deploy
VMware Auto Deploy
The auto deploy application which comes as an OVT template is basically just a jumped-up vMA, with the added extra's of DHCP, TFTP, HTTP servers and a deploy-cmd CLi and Database.
Here is a brief overview of how VMware Auto Deploy works once configured:
PXE boot the target server
ESXi is installed onto the target server from the auto deploy app
The ESXi host will then be added into your vCenter
The ESXi host will then have a Host Profile applied to it.
This makes life pretty easy.
What I didn't know and it didn't mention on the labs site was that the ESXi install was Stateless. The ESXi install is only held in memory. So if you reboot the server you'd see a "No Operating System Found" message.
Before VMware Auto Deploy, I hadn't ever given Stateless ESXi a second thought. The configuration of a host once ESXi was installed was a lot more detailed than the initial install itself and took time to complete. Now with the use of Host Profiles we are able to Install and Configure an ESXi host within a matter of minutes and 100% automatically. At this rate I'll be doing myself out of a job! However, I also believe it's the way most large deployments will head in the not so distant future. We are beginning to see an increase in the amount of diskless servers/blades coming onto the market, which is ushering us down the route of using Stateless installs.
I'm not going to go into the in's and out's of the application configuration as it's all available in the VMware Auto Deploy Administrator's Guide. It's very simple
I saw this little discussion on an internal mailing list a week or so ago and I've decided to post it too The SLOG – 1. So I don't forget it, 2. I'm sure many of you will at some point use Jumbo frames in the future on your vSphere environments.
Question: "Assuming that I enable jumbo frames, is there a way on in the VM to determine is jumbo frames are truly supported end-to-end?"
Answer:
In your VM, ping your destination with a large message and specify don’t fragment.
Linux VMs: ping –M do –s 8000 <ip address or destination>
Windows VMs: ping –f –l 8000 <ip address or destination>
ESX(i): vmkping –d –s 8000 <ip address or destination>
Another year has passed….Where the hell did that go? Well 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.
Once again 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.
Scott Vessey has just announced on his VMTraining Blog that the new VCAP4-DSA Exam will be available as of the 13th September.
I've been waiting for this for a while as I missed the opportunity to site the Beta exam. So, I'm off to grab the latest copy of the Exam Blueprint to start preparing.
Watching this brought back the excitement I felt after the VMware MVP presentation that VMware made back at VMWorld 2008. Since then it's all been quiet…..Until now.
Hey guys, Welcome! I'm Simon Long and I've setup this Blog to pass on my experiences and other useful information, mostly focused around Virtualization.