WJPatton.com » vSphere

VMware KB1024051 – MSCS vCenter Clustering Unsupported

wjpatton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:40:13 +0000

A newly published VMware KB1024051 article now states that “VMware does not support third party clustering products.”

This means that Microsoft Clustering Service or Veritas Cluster Services are not supported for vCenter 4.x.

Please take this into account when designing mission-critical vCenter deployments. These customers should be looking at VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat with VMware HA instead of third-party clustering products.

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

VMware vSphere Hardening Guide – Draft Rev. B

wjpatton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:46:54 +0000

VMware has released a draft of the vSphere Hardening Guide, and are encouraging feedback from the community. It is broken into multiple pieces.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Virtual Machines

Part 3: Host

Part 4: vNetwork

Part 5: vCenter

Part 6: COS

VCP vSphere Practise Exam

wjpatton — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:54:51 +0000

Simon Long of The Slog has posted a VCP vSphere Practise Exam built out of VMware documentation and personal information and experience. Looks great, I plan on taking it tonight to brush up!

Take the Exam here.

VCP vSphere Practise Exam

Re-Post: Yellow-Bricks.com – Another year…

wjpatton — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:45:51 +0000

Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com posted an article reflecting on another year passing by in his life; however the the article turned into much more with great insight and information on how and why he blogs with tips for others looking to make the dive into it themselves.

I personally have taken (stolen with credit given, but still stolen) many ideas from Duncan Epping and Yellow-Bricks.com. Personally, I don’t know, even with his tips on how to find time for blogging, how he finds time to have a full-time job with VMware, maintain a first rate blog and even collaborate on a new vSphere Pocket Guide book! (Coming soon via lulu.com)

Congratulations to Duncan on all his hard work and the successes it has brought him, he is certainly deserving.

Please read the post on Yellow-Bricks.com here.

Best of VMworld 2009 Awards

wjpatton — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:04:32 +0000

Congratulations to all those that won, and those that placed. Many great vendors with fantastic software in this list! Take a look at each of them for your own VMware infrastructure, they can add a great deal of value.

Old hats to VMware like Vizioncore with their vRanger are still top of their game, and newcomers like HyTrust have suddenly made a big splash.

Take a look at the whole list and explanations here.

VMware Tech Resource: vSphere 4 CPU Scheduler in ESX 4

wjpatton — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:13:37 +0000

VMware document defining Scheduler process improvements, and changes for ESX 4. There are some very significant changes, and there are always many customer, client, and user questions about how ESX handles the Scheduler functions.

Get the document here.

ESX 4 CPU Scheduler Talking Points

wjpatton — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:38:05 +0000

If you are like me and get lots of questions about something that most customers, users, and even administrators will never see or interact with but is very core to Virtualization; this is a great 4 point list for you from Drummonds of VMware.

Check out his post here.

ESX 4 Web Access Service

wjpatton — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:23:46 +0000

Within ESX 4 the /ui/ website has been disabled by default.

To enable the site, you will need to start the webaccess service.

service vmware-webAccess start

This will start the /ui website on your ESX host.

This service is not required by tools such as BMC Patrol, nor is it required to create web console URLs for Users and Developers to manage their VMs as these should be created through Virtualcenter URLs not direct to ESX URLs as VMotion/DRS/HA will break direct to ESX URLs.

For tools such as BMC products, you will need to allow access to the ESX host itself via AD integrated authentication or local users. This needs to be modified in both the Users and Groups tab, as well as the Permissions tab.

DPM and VUM

wjpatton — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:06:18 +0000

There is still a disconnect between the DPM (Distributed Power Management) and VUM (VMware Update Manager) products.

VUM is unable to restart an ESX Host that DPM has placed into Standby.

I opened a discussion on VMTN about this with DPM in vSphere and VUM 4.0 that I have been testing.

The issue was confirmed by Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com. However, he did reveal that integrating these two products is a priority for future updates/releases!

Truely, great news as the cost savings from DPM are quite large, and the loss of productivity from a manual process of Scanning and Patching is also large.

Check out the VMTN discussion here .

Disconnected Hosts – Hostd

wjpatton — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:33:45 +0000

Good article about troubleshooting Hostd (mgmt-vmware) issues.

http://blog.colovirt.com/2008/10/27/reconnecting-disconnected-vmware-esx-server-to-virtual-infrastructure/