01/30/2012
This morning I took the VCP510 exam and passed!
This was a little tougher than the VCP4 exam. 85 questions, and it took me an hour. Lots of good questions. This is one thing that I have liked about VMware, is that they make it near impossible to pass these without hands-on experience (either production, or a lab).
Good luck if you are going to take it soon – remember, you have until the...
01/23/2012
Today VMware announced on it’s blog that the RAID 1o requirements will be dropped, and that VMware will be supporting RAID 5 and RAID 6 as well.
See the blog here, and see the updated documentation here.
So, this means that you will be able to use more of your local storage!
Before, with RAID 10 and the VSA mirroring the 2 ESXi server’s local storage, it meant that you could only use...
11/21/2011
Every so often, it’s good practice to change passwords. I think that everyone it IT is aware of that. One of the most overlooked passwords is the local Administrator’s password on every machine on the network.
Sure, your user’s are required to change theirs every 90 days, and you change your domain Administrator’s password at times as well. The local Administrator on your...
11/16/2011
I’ve been getting frustrated with Windows lately – like everyone has at some point or another.. So I decided I would attempt to run Linux on my laptop instead. (I’m dual-booting for now).
I’ve dabbled with Ubuntu every year or so, but I still a linux beginner. I don’t like the Unity interface of Ubuntu, but I found out that I can continue to use gnome, or more...
11/02/2011
Since vSphere 5 was released earlier this year, it is now time to get ready to pass the VCP exam. I am a VCP for both 3.5 and 4, and decided I would post some updates along the way as I study before taking the VCP 5 exam.
The first thing I did was create a lab environment. I currently use 2 whitebox ESXi 5 servers, attached to iSCSI storage.
However, since I am studying VMware products, I don...
11/01/2011
One of the things I like about Exchange distribution groups is that they can be manged by the list’s owner, taking a bit of work off the IT department, and allowing managers to maintain their department groups. However, the process is slightly different for Exchange 2010. In Exchange 2010, the permission to manage the lists is now in RBAC (Role Based Access Control).
By default, in...
10/24/2011
Management and Maintenance
As if getting the VSA installed wasn’t easy enough, VMware has made the VSA virtually (no pun intended) management free.
With your Datacenter selected, simply click back on the VSA Manager tab, and you will be presented with the page below:
In the top window, is the VSA Cluster settings. All self explanatory here – the IP information your set during setup...
09/18/2011
Installation and Configuration
Now it’s time to install the VSA. Remember, we need 2 (or 3) fresh ESXi 5.0 installs, joined to our vCenter server.
Now, for the easy part… (it’s actually all easy)
Installation:
Run the VSA setup from the CD on your vSphere server.
Click next and “I accept” through the first screen and agreements.
Enter in your name or IP address of...
08/26/2011
With the release of vSphere 5, comes VMware’s VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance).
What exactly is it? Well, it’s VMware’s answer of providing shared storage to SMBs that don’t purchase a physical SAN or NAS. It will use the local storage in each ESX box, and present it to the VSA VM, and that in turn will present it back to the ESX servers as shared storage. Each ESX...
08/03/2011
Thanks to the numerous traffic about vSphere 5′s vRAM “tax” – VMware has changed the entitlements.
(Take a look at Justin’s post here explaining vRAM “tax” and how it works.)
Basically, VMware has made 3 changes:
Increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions.
Capped the amount of vRAM counted in any given VM
More flexible in calculating and...
07/14/2011
New on the Android market today: VMware View – Tech Preview for Android.
From the market:
VMware View Client for Android makes it easy to access your Windows virtual desktop from your Android with the best possible user experience on the Local Area Network (LAN) or across a Wide Area Network (WAN).
This client supports PCoIP only, and is fantastic! I had been using Wyse Pocket Cloud to...
07/14/2011
Today I took 70-646, Windows Server 2008: Server Administrator and PASSED! I am now an Microsoft Certified IT Professional, Server Administrator.
I liked this last test in the bunch. Instead of just 50 multiple choice questions, it was 22, and had 5 case studies. The case studies were what I liked. They gave you a good deal of information about what the client’s needs, and requirements...
07/11/2011
Recently, I had a Windows 2008 R2 server, running Backup Exec, that was constantly failing during snapshot processing backing up the system state. The backups would show the following error:
AOFO: Initialization failure on: "System$State". Advanced
Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy
Service (VSS).
V-79-10000-11226 - VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft
Volume Shadow Copy Service (...
07/10/2011
I’ve noticed on several occasions that the right shift key doesn’t seem to work in RDP sessions when I am using a VMware View desktop with PCoIP. The first couple times, I thought I was just mistyping the password, but after checking in the username field, sure enough the right shift key was not recognized, and it was not making my letters uppercase. Left shift worked just fine, but...
06/26/2011
I acquired an Asus Transformer tablet, and wanted to share my thoughts on it. Here are the specs:
Nvidia Tegra 2 1Ghz dual core CPU, 1 GB RAM
16GB or 32BG storage
Android 3.0 Honeycomb
Wifi 802.11b/g/n, bluetooth, and GPS
10.1″ IPS display with 178⁰ viewing angle
Micro SD slot
Mini HDMI port
Headphone jack
12.98mm thick, and 680g
Rear 5MP camera, and front 1.2MP camera
There are a couple...
06/14/2011
AdminSDHolder is a container inside active directory that maintains a master list of permissions for objects that are members of privileged groups in active directory. Below are some of the groups:
Administrators
Domain Admins
Enterprise Admins
Schema Admins
Domain Controllers
Server Operators
etc.
Basically, every hour, windows will compare the security permissions of an account (that is a...
06/13/2011
I’ve been working on an exchange migration recently, and was at the point that I needed to replicate the public folders to the new 2010 server from 2007. This particular Exchange Server had only a few public folders, so I went the manual route. On the Exchange 2007 Server, I opened up Public Folder Management Console from the toolbox, and right clicked on each folder, chose properties, and...
04/25/2011
Microsoft released their iSCSI target software earlier this month for Windows Server 2008 R2. This used to be only for windows 2008 Storage Server. This is good news for those who wish to have a Windows 2008 Server host storage for ESX, or Hyper V. You won’t get the bells and whistle’s like you would with a EqualLogic or EMC SAN, and you won’t get the performance either; what...
04/14/2011
It was pointed out to me by a co-worker that the NIC in a VMware virtual machine shows up as a removable device in the system tray. While this may not seem like a big deal, it actually can be. If you choose to ‘eject’ the nic, not only does it disappear from windows; but it will also no longer be in the hardware list of the VM’s settings. A new nic would have to be added, and then windows...
04/13/2011
VMware just launched Cloud Foundry, which is a PaaS. Platform as a Service. According to the FAQ, there will be three offerings:
CloudFoundry.com – a complete hosted PaaS environment.
CloudFoundry.org – an open source cloud.
CloundFoundry Micro – a downloadable instance to run on the desktop for developers.
VMware Cloud Foundry - from cloudfoundry.com
The website didn’t...
