These days, I am working on a project involving VMware Capacity Planner. Part of its deployment means that one has to troubleshoot access issues, in order to get successful inventory and performance scans. I am planning to write a couple of posts to document tips that one generally doesn't find in documentation. In the meantime, [...]
Now that VMworld is over and I've taken a breather, I guess it’s time for me to recap the few wonderful days spent in Barcelona and reflect on what I got out of my attendance. Yes, I know it’s late but let’s just say, I was tied up. Like many others, my conference started on [...]
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 - [...]
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 [...]
One of my colleagues is currently researching cloud services. Like me, he is also very interested in VMware Hybrid Cloud and created an account as soon as it was made available. However, despite using supported browsers, he ran into problems trying to delete a virtual machine that he had created earlier. Every time he tried, [...]
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 [...]
I've had my virtual infrastructure labs in their various incarnations for more than a decade now and the most recent one is based around a "whitebox" Dual-Quad core Xeon server, with 24 GB RAM. This system was built in 2007 so the processors (while the best in their time) have become a bit of a limitation now. [...]