As many of you already know there is an issue with the encryption mechanism of ESX(i) 4.1. When passwords are used which are longer than 8 characters the password will be truncated after the 8th character. As such during authentication only the first 8 characters are used. In other words if you have  a 10 character password you will only need to [...]

There’s a cool new feature added to vSphere 4.1 for HA. If an error occurs you can easily check what the issue is by going to your cluster and clicking the “Cluster Operational Issues” line on the Summary tab. If there are no issues the screen will be completely gray. I forced an issue though so you can see what [...]

I received this Paper a while back and think it is an excellent read. I just copied a random part of the paper to give you an idea of what it covers. There’s not much more to say about it then just read it, it is as in-depth as it can get on FT. I read it several times by [...]

I was asked if I could ask my readers to fill out the following survey. Hopefully all of you will be so kind to fill it out and help VMware taking the next logical step, which ever that might be. Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz today. But when people talk about cloud, do they mean IaaS, PaaS or [...]

Yes you are reading it correctly. Today I was verifying links I added to a document. Both links referred to an MSCS based vCenter Server. Although not everyone will have an environment where a Clustered vCenter Server is a must there are many where availability of vCenter is critical. To those who vCenter Server running clustered please note the following [...]

Early 2009 I wrote an article on the impact of Primary Nodes and Secondary Nodes on your design. This was primarily focussed on Blade environments and basically it discussed how to avoid having all your primary nodes in a single chassis. If that single chassis would fail, no VMs would be restarted as one of the primary nodes is the [...]

My VMware Cloud Team colleague Max Daneri of VMTS fame was building a vSphere 4.1 environment this week. During the installation of VUM(VMware Update Manager) he ran into an issue with the database connection which I thought would be useful to share with you. After some playing around he found out that apparently VUM requires a 32-bit ODBC DSN. Which [...]