One of our product managers asked me if I could share this survey with the world. The topic is vCenter Federation and APIs. It literally takes a couple of minutes to fill out. Your help / input is greatly appreciated, so please if you have those two minutes to spare at the end of the day, then take the time:
Awesome Fling: vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check
22 March, 2013 By 4 Comments
One of the things that many people have asked me is how they could check if their environment was meeting the requirements for an upgrade to 5.1. Until today I never really had a good answer for it but fortunately that has changed. Alan Renouf has spent countless of hours developing a script that validated your environment and assesses if it is ready for an upgrade to vSphere 5.1.
This is a PowerShell script written to help customers validate their environment and assess if it is ready for a 5.1.x upgrade. The script checks against known misconfiguration and issues raised with VMware Support. This script checks the Windows Server and Active Directory configuration and provides an on screen report of known issues or configuration issues, the script also provides a text report which can help with further trouble shooting.
Is that helpful or what? Instead of going through the motion your just run this pre-flight script and it will tell you if you are good to go or not, or if changes are required. If you are planning an upgrade or are about to upgrade make sure to run this script.
Awesome job Alan, lets keep these coming!
VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor-Manager 1.1 is out, sign up for it!
19 March, 2013 By 2 Comments
VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 is a minor release with the following new capabilities:
- Migration of virtual machines from Hyper-V to ESX or ESXi hosts.
- Support for the latest Microsoft Hyper-V3 hypervisor (as well as the earlier versions).
- Increased scalability with regards to the number of supported third-party hosts to 50 (from 20 in MHM 1.0).
- Ability to provide custom certificates for the MHM server from the installer wizard.
- Multiple objects selection in the UI and a number of other usability improvements.
- Plus a number of server and client-side bug fixes.
If you have some Hyper-V hosts in your environment that you want to manage, or need to migrate from Hyper-V to vSphere, then make sure to download this nice vCenter add-on. It is in Beta, and I am certain the engineering team will appreciate all the feedback you can give.
vCenter Heartbeat installation and validation
5 February, 2013 By 2 Comments
Today the vCenter Heartbeat team shared a video with me that they created. This video shows the vCenter Heartbeat installation and how to validate the installation itself. The KB Video team blogged about it also today, and you can find there article here which was the foundation for this article.
This video is a first installment of a series answering the most common questions asked by the VMware user community when deploying vCenter Server Heartbeat. Whether deploying in High Availability or Disaster Recovery deployment modes, this video will offer key points, tips and considerations for a successful deployment.
For more detailed information you can find the links to the relevant documentation sites.
To familiarize yourself with the Heartbeat installation requirements, see the Heartbeat documentation page here.For vSphere 5.1 documentation, see the vSphere 5.1 documentation page here.
Storage vMotion does not rename files?
25 January, 2013 By 32 Comments
A while back I posted that 5.0 U2 re-introduced the renaming behavior for VM file names. I was just informed by our excellent Support Team that unfortunately the release notes missed something crucial and Storage vMotion does not rename files by default. In order to get the renaming behavior you will have to set an advanced setting within vCenter.. This is how you do it:
- Go to “Administration”
- Click on “vCenter Server Settings”
- Click “Advanced Settings”
- Add the key “provisioning.relocate.enableRename” with value “true” and click “add”
- Restart vCenter service or vCenter Server
Now the renaming of the files during the SvMotion process should work again!
All of you who need this functionality, please make sure to add this advanced setting.
Awesome appliance, vCenter Support Assistant
25 January, 2013 By 10 Comments
Today an awesome appliance called the vCenter Support Assistant was made available to the world. I have seen some screenshots and a demo and feel that this appliance is a MUST HAVE for anyone who files Support Requests. Just the fact that you can do that from a single interface, which also allows you to upload the support bundle just makes life a whole lot easier.
Ryan Johnson wrote an excellent article on this topic… and I am going to steal his thunder so I suggest you head over to the VMware TAM Program blog (open to everyone) and read up on this excellent Appliance.
vCenter Server 5.1.0b released
21 December, 2012 By 6 Comments
I was doing some testing with vCenter Server 5.1.0b this Wednesday and Thursday and just noticed it was released today. Those who were experiencing time-out issues with the web client or were unable to login to the web client using a non-standard UPN as an AD user will want to check this release out.
Full release notes can be found here. I did the upgrade using the upgrade repository iso: VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5300-947940-updaterepo.iso. Very useful if you do not have direct access to the internet from your vCenter Server Appliance. Steps are straight forward:
- Attach ISO to your vCenter Appliance
- Login to: https://<vcenter server ip>:5480
- Click the “Update” tab
- Click “Settings”
- Select “Use CDROM updates”
- Click “Status”
- Click “Check updates” under “Actions”
- Now it should say that a new version has been found and hit “Install updates” under “Actions”!
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