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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
While working with server builds and configurations, one is frequently faced with a scenario where the system (as a client), needs to connect to a server at the other end and the process doesn't work. If one's lucky then an intelligent message is returned by the interface, hinting about the problem but more often than not, the [...]
Configuration of VRM Server (vSphere Replication Management Server) is one of the steps that one has to perform while installing SRM (Site Recovery Manager) 5.0. A prerequisite for it is to have a compatible database available and the VRMS appliance deployed in advance. However, when going through the configuration, one could sometimes see an error message while [...]
When upgrading a vCenter server from version 4.x to 5.0, you may encounter an error: "The Windows installer service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running windows in safe mode, or if windows installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance." You may genuinely have a broken Windows [...]
As I've been asked about this several times, I thought I should post something about it as this doesn't seem to be common knowledge: VMware Tools can be installed on Windows 2008 (R2) Server Core. A common misconception is that since Server Core doesn't have a GUI (Graphical User Interface), it can't run the VMware [...]
I know - you must be thinking why would anyone want to upgrade a vSphere 4.0 environment to 4.1 when version 5.0 is out now. Well, I can think of a couple of reasons why one might think of doing that. One is the fact that many organisations are still not ready to move to version [...]
For those of you who follow VMware products closely, the past couple of weeks have been quite interesting. VMware has announced vSphere 5.0 which has a lot of new exciting features and as always, bigger limits for resources that people are unlikely to hit... ever! However, it is unfortunate that this version of vSphere is making headlines [...]