12 08, 2013

StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN: Shared Storage for my VMware Workstation Powered Lab

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00August 12th, 2013|ESX, Review, StarWind, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|1 Comment

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 [...]

29 07, 2013

VMware Update Manager Plugin Error: Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 29th, 2013|ESX, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, VUM|21 Comments

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 [...]

22 07, 2013

How to Install vCenter 5.1 SSO (Single Sign On): Common Pitfalls and Remedies

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 22nd, 2013|Cloud, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|6 Comments

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 [...]

21 06, 2013

Book Review: VCDX Boot Camp: Preparing for the VCDX Panel Defense (VMware Press)

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 21st, 2013|Book Review, General, How To, VCDX, Virtualization|1 Comment

Today, I am doing a book review of VCDX Boot Camp: Preparing for the VCDX Panel Defense (VMware Press).  This is a book not only for VCDX hopefuls but also for people who want to see what's involved in becoming one.  What could be better than a book written by three VCDXs (who are also [...]

6 06, 2013

How to Recover Virtual Machines with Corrupt Snapshots

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 6th, 2013|Disaster Recovery, ESX, General, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization|0 Comments

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 [...]

29 05, 2013

Today, I became a vExpert

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00May 29th, 2013|General, Virtualization|2 Comments

It was announced today and if you are a virtualization enthusiast, it might be old news to you by now.  It's an honour to be part of such a knowledgeable community of people, which I consider to be the best in the computing industry. I have been blogging for a few years now but never [...]

19 03, 2013

VMware Hybrid Cloud: “There was an error running your last operation….”

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00March 19th, 2013|Cloud, How To, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows|0 Comments

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, [...]

16 03, 2013

Getting Started with VMware Hybrid Cloud

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00March 16th, 2013|Cloud, ESX, Firewall, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows|0 Comments

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 [...]

4 02, 2013

Converting VMware Workstation Thick Disks (VMDKs) to Thin

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00February 4th, 2013|ESX, vCenter, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Workstation|1 Comment

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 [...]

28 01, 2013

Building (or Upgrading) a Virtual Home Lab Machine – Part III

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00January 28th, 2013|Hardware, vCenter, View, Virtual Lab, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|5 Comments

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 [...]

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