In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab. In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup. Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]
Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions. One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite. In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]
You might see an error, immediately after installation of VUM (VMware Update Manager) and after installing its plugin: There was an error connecting to VMware vSphere Update Manager - [Server Name:443]. Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems. Here is a screenshot for reference: VMware Update Manager - Plugin Error This generally happens [...]
The time has come for me to rebuild my lab after a good few months so I've been trashing and rebuilding all over the place. While building something, I blog about any issues hit but sometimes, there isn't enough time and you miss a post or two. This blog post is to correct one of [...]
There are times when a virtual machine might start rebooting or shut down completely, due to one or more snapshots for that machine getting corrupt. Depending on the type of failure, recovery from such a situation is possible and at times, with all data intact. For example, when a backup solution takes a snapshot as [...]
In the past couple of years, the term "cloud services" has become very fashionable. Every company wants to be on it. So, even if your day-to-day job is not virtualization, it still makes sense to know about it. Now, even though a cloud service is just a platform outside your own private environment, to someone [...]
Recently, I built a new machine for my lab (for those interested in the story, here are Parts I, II and III). I put a 512GB SSD in the new machine with the aim to thin-provision all virtual machines but still get good performance, due to the high number of IOPS/read/write you get from SSDs. Once [...]
In the first and second posts of this series, I covered my thought process for deciding what hardware and software to use for my new lab machine and then what I actually bought and built, respectively. In this last post of the series, I intend to cover some optimizations I did after the build, some [...]
In the first part of this post, I detailed the notes that I took while upgrading my VMware View 5.0.1 environment to 5.1. I also mentioned some of the preparations that one should make before carrying out the upgrade. In this post, I'll write about the rest of the upgrade process that I followed and also mention [...]
If you are interested in VMware View, you might have noticed that version 5.1 came out recently. You might also know that it contains some eagerly awaited enhancements like View Storage Accelerator, Improved Persona Management options and ability to have a standalone View Composer machine, amongst other things. For those reasons, I thought I should [...]