Recently, I was building a nested ESXi environment in my lab, based on vSphere 5.5. Regular readers will remember that I generally use VMware Workstation (version 10, in this case) to run my virtual environment. I usually have my ESXi hosts configured with 8 NICs, which is pretty handy when I have to play with [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 my last post, I discussed the things that are important to me when I am considering to build a new machine for my lab and my reasons for choosing certain options when building a new one. I promised to report on what I bought and built after making the decisions above and how it went, [...]