Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for January 2010

It’s a trend?!

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There seems to be a trend in the blogosphere the last months. I already tweeted about it a couple of time but decided to create a list to make it more obvious for some of you non-believers. I guess after reading the following list the question is “who is next” and of course “where can I place my bet?”.

  • Simon Gallagher –> VMware
  • Simon Long –> VMware
  • Simon Seagrave –> EMC
  • Bas Raayman –> EMC
  • Rich Brambley –> Veeam
  • Alan Renouf –> EMC
  • Hany Michael –> VMware
  • Kenneth van Ditmarsch –> VMware
  • Scott Lowe –> EMC
  • Frank Denneman –> VMware
  • Rick Scherer –> EMC
  • Ken Cline –> Quest
  • Massimo Re Ferrè –> VMware
  • Ed Saipetch –> EMC
  • Mike Laverick –> Tech Target
  • …. more to come soon! Believe me.

Now I’m not judging any of the people mentioned or any of the vendors recruiting these experts; It’s merely an observation. Better said I fully understand why this is happening. The VMware community is full of experienced and knowledgeable people and especially the bloggers have a high visibility.

Now, place your bet.

Draft version of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide available

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VMware published the draft version of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide. Keep in mind that it’s still draft and needs tweaking. The Team needs your feedback, so if you have any comments please don’t hesitate to reach out and leave a comment on the community forums.

Overall, there are more than 100 guidelines. The guide itself is split into the following major sections:

Please bare in mind the following:

Another new aspect of the guide is the desire to create it with input from the VMware community. This draft is available for public comment for a period of approximately one month. VMware’s intention is to incorporate public feedback into the next revision of the guide, which will be the final version. However, this current revision is the result of a private review of an initial draft, and so we believe that the final version will not differ too significantly. This revision can therefore be used for customer production deployments today, with the caveat that some new guidelines might be added and some existing ones slightly modified.

Thanks Charu for posting these! They contain really valuable info.

Setup cannot create vCenter Server Directory Services instance. Error 28038

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While doing a new install of VMware vCenter Server I ran into the following error:

Setup cannot create vCenter Server Directory Services instance. Error 28038

This error is caused by the fact that the “Network Service” does not have enough permissions on the root of the drive you’re installing vCenter on. The solution is pretty straight forward and has been described in the KB article.

  1. Right-click the root drive and click Properties.
  2. Click the Security tab.
  3. Under Group and user names, click Add.
  4. Enter Network Service and click OK.
  5. Check Allow for the Read permission for the Network Service account in the Permissions for Administrators pane.
  6. Click Apply and OK.

If this does not resolve the issue look into the following KB articles: 1015887 , 1013822.

Update your bookmarks…

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It’s time to update your bookmarks and/or RSS reader. Steve Jin, author of the book “VMware VI and vSphere SDK” and creator of the vSphere Java API, recently started blogging. His blog is called DoubleCloud and I highly recommend following Steve’s writings as he is one smart cookie.

Frank Denneman moved to a new home yesterday, well a new location for his Blog of course. Make sure you update your bookmarks/rss reader.

Podcast 79 – Building your homelab

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The VMTN/PlanetV12n Podcast 79 was all about homelabs. You can download the MP3 here, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here, or listen in live here every wednesday. As always I tried to capture most links that have been posted. The link by the way also contains a summary of what has been discussed. Have fun: