I was just asked if I could promote the VMworld Labs Survey. The survey has been created to get an idea of which Labs will be popular for lab proctor training purposes. As there are 30 Labs this year it will be impossible for a proctor to know all of these inside out, this survey will give an idea how [...]

After the whole MSCS’ed vCenter support discussion VMware Technical Marketing reached out to me. Lets be clear, the intention of this article is not to change support. The intention of this article is to get an idea of how many of you would be interested in seeing a whitepaper on vCenter resiliency with MSCS/VCS which could be supported on best [...]

I was reading about Storage Filters last week and wanted to do a short write up. I totally forgot about it until I noticed this new KB article. The KB article only discusses the LUN filters though and not the other filters that are available today. Currently 4 filters have been made public: config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter config.vpxd.filter.vmfsFilter config.vpxd.filter.rdmFilter config.vpxd.filter.SameHostAndTransportsFilter The first filter [...]

I was reading through some documentation and found a piece on creating a cold Standby vCenter server. This used to be a common practice with vCenter 2.5 and it worked well as vCenter itself was more or less stateless. With vSphere 4.0 something changed. Although at first it might not seem substantial it actually is. As of vSphere 4.0 VMware [...]

I was reviewing a document today and noticed something that I’ve seen a couple of times already. I already wrote about Active/Standby set ups for etherchannels a year ago but this is a slight different variant. Frank also wrote a more extensive article on it a while and I just want to re-stress this. Scenario: Two NICs 1 Etherchannel of 2 links [...]

One of my customers experienced high CPU load on their physical switch. After some investigation they noticed broadcasts packets being sent every two seconds. The first reaction was Beacon Probing is probably enabled. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. But VMware GSS came to the rescue and pointed us towards a KB article. Apparently a bug has been identified in 4.0 which [...]

I was just playing around with the HA Cli and noticed that when you give an “ln” (listNodes) that the failover coordinator (aka master primary) is also listed. I have never noticed this before, but don’t have a pre-vSphere 4.1 environment to test it on to see if this existed before 4.1. If you want to test it in your [...]