Thincomputing.net just posted about a new Xenserver Beta. Looking at the new features list it seems things are finally getting up to speed, especially “bonding of NIC’s” is a must have in a enterprise environment. Hope you can also pin the live migration on a specific NIC in this release, but looking at the specs […]

I just had a discussion about an upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5. During that conversation the new HBA drivers that VMware uses came up. After an upgrade it seems that the queue depth settings are lost. Thinking about it I can understand why. ESX 3.5 uses different driver for most HBA’s. For instance Emulex, their […]

Today I encountered a weird error during an implementation of VMware Consolidated Backup. When ever I ran vcbmounter I received the following error:”Run time error - the application the application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.”
It seemed that for some reason the vcbuser did not have the role “VMware consolidated backup […]

That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of […]

Today I was busy trying to find out a way to schedule VCB backups with Commvault with just 1 schedule without having to rewrite your script every time someone creates a VM. The standard procedure is to create a subclient for every VM which is very human error prone. I stumbled upon a blog on […]

VDI seems to be hot lately. VMware just posted 4 pdf’s which are related to VDI and/or VDM:
Using VMware VDI and vmSight for Stronger and Sustainable HIPAA and PCI Compliance

For many organizations, HIPAA and PCI compliance is no longer optional. Penalties are increasingly stiff, and the ultimate cost of non-compliance – the breach of personal […]

A new version of Virtual Iron will be released later this day:
Release Number: 4.2.13
New Feature:

Linux VSTools installation for kernel updates / new distros

Fixes:

Windows VSTools hangs during installation
SLES 10 CD Based installs fail
Archive manager stops running
Network associations lost when ports are reset
When VSTools is checked on W2k3 domain controller guest all logins fail

A couple of days ago I wrote about the problems with VST and the Intel Quad-port nics. I tested the work around, using “access ports” on the physical switch(EST, external switch tagging) and it seems that the problem is “solved”. A couple of hours ago VMware posted a knowledge base article about this problem, so […]

One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much […]

This week I implemented a couple of Dell 2950 Servers which contained an Intel quad-port nic. The physical switch ports were setup as a trunk so I used VST(Virtual Switch Tagging). I combined the onboard Broadcom ports with the Intel quad-port nics to have the most redundant setup. When I started testing the HA and […]