I received a question last week from a former colleague around some of the memory details in vCenter. There are a couple of places where memory details are shown on a “VM level” within the vCenter client. The first tab that we will discuss is the Summary tab. It shows “General” and “Resources”. It appears that there is a lot [...]

I was just building a vCD Lab and thought I would document the process. I know Hany has done something similar recently but mine is slightly different. I wanted to have a slim config from a memory perspective and virtual machine count perspective. Before I start, let’s give a warning… ***this is totally unsupported*** Pre-requisites: CentOS 5 – 64 Bit [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]