When I tried to download patches via a freshly installed VMware vSphere Update Manager today I received the following error: https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/index.xml; hosting the patch definitions and patches cannot be reached or has no patch data Although we configured a proxy including the appropriate account it would not work. As suggested in this KB article I removed the “http://” part of [...]
I’ve been conducting VCDX Defense Interviews for a while now. Last week in Las Vegas during PEX something struck me and I guess this post by Frank Denneman is a good example… On a regular basis I come across NFS based environments where the decision is made to store the virtual machine swap files on local VMFS datastores. Using host-local [...]
I attended VMware Partner Exchange this week in Las Vegas. I must say I was impressed. To be completely blunt; I wasn’t impressed with Vegas. Vegas is definitely not my cup of tea. I love a bit of “history” and Vegas hardly has any. Give me San Francisco, New York, Boston or any other city anytime! I do however was [...]
An often asked question when implementing NFS based storage is what do these advanced settings represent you are recommending me to change? VMware published a great KB article which describes these. For instance: NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures The number of consecutive heartbeat requests that must fail before the server is marked as unavailable. The KB article does not only explain the separate NFS settings but also [...]
Those doing planning might well be interested in these stats from a real-world ThinPrint deployment in respect of how well it compresses jobs. We started by testing a job typical of the users; a PDF consisting of scanned black and white pages. He we measured the data passed on the network for each of ThinPrint’s compression settings. Setting Job size [...]
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the vSphere Security Hardening Guide. Just a couple of days later William “the king of Perl” Lam already produced a script that checks the Hardening Guide best practices against your environment. It produces a great html based report. Source While going through the COS/HOST and VM documentation, I noticed there were quite [...]
I received a bunch of questions around storage masking over the last couple of weeks. One of them was around VMware’s best practice to mask LUNs on a per cluster basis. The best practice has been around for years and basically is there to reduce conflicts. More hosts accessing the same LUNs means more overhead, just to give you an [...]
