A week ago I already touched on this topic but I wanted to get a better understand for myself what could go wrong in these situations and how vSphere 4.1 solves this issue. Pre-vSphere 4.1 an issue could arise when shares had been set custom on a virtual machine. When HA fails over a virtual machine it will power-on the [...]

I received multiple questions around this so decided to ask around internally. I managed to get ahold of the VMware Update Manager (aka VUM) Product Manager and after exchanging a couple of emails this is the outcome: VMware vSphere Compatibility Matrixes Table 13 on page 14 of the above linked document states that VUM doesn’t support MS SQL 2008 Standard. [...]

When installing vCenter 4.1 on Windows 2008 R2 64-bit one of my colleagues ran into the following error message: This product can only be installed on the following 64-bit operating systems: Windows XP SP2 or above Windows 2003 Windows 2008 Although this message is actually correct it was not what was causing this problem as he followed the documentation and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]