VMware - Virtually Benevolent

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VMware

A collection of 19 posts

Project Nautilus

Introducing VMware Project Nautilus: Project Nautilus brings OCI container support to Fusion, enabling users to build, run and test apps for nearly any OS or cloud right from the comfort of your own Mac. With Project Nautilus, Fusion now has the ability to run Containers as well as VMs. Pull

Certified Expert

I’m pleased to announce that yesterday I passed the VCAP6.5-DCD exam, thus earning the VMware Certified Implementation Engineer – Data Center Virtulization “milestone” after elevating the VCAP5-DCA exam that I earned back in 2014. The DCD exam has been on my list of things to do since not long

VMware TAM

I have accepted a job with VMware, as a Technical Account Manager (TAM). To say I’m excited about this would be a gross understatement. VMware has been the company I’ve spent the majority of my technical focus on up to this point, and since announcing this change on

VCSA Migration

Last night I did my first customer migration from a Windows based vCenter to the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using the new 6.0 U2M utility. The customer was previously running vCenter 5.1 GA on a Windows Server 2008 R2 based physical HP host. In order to migrate

RAID Crash

Recently I had two VMware Horizon View proof of concept setups for work, where we designed an all in one Cisco UCS C240 M4 box, full of local SSD and spindles, in various RAID sets. This lets the customer kick the tires on View in a small setup to see

Guidance Change

A few months ago I wrote about the VMware View optimization script breaking Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat through the addition of a registry entry that disabled Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR): ASLR was a feature added to Windows starting with Vista. It’s present in Linux and Mac OS

Jabber Persona

I just got finished with a customer issue who had deployed Cisco Jabber along with VMware View, using Persona Management and floating desktops set to refresh at logoff. Much to their annoyance, users would have to reconfigure their Cisco Jabber client with the server connection settings and any client customizations

Partner Board

I just flew back from Palo Alto where I’ve been attending the VMware Partner Technical Advisory Board on End User Computing. Prior to a couple of months ago, I’d never heard of a PTAB, and then I got invited to one. The purpose of the PTAB is for

Broken Security

I’ve been using the Windows Optimization Guide for View Desktops guide on the VMware website for a long time. Hidden inside the PDF are some text file attachments that when converted to .bat, run though and disable most of the functions that bloat virtual desktop linked clones or are

NIC Life

Life is rough for a ESXi network card these days, both pNIC and vNIC. It’s especially bad if you’re using E1000/E1000e adapters in your VMs, or using Broadcom network cards, or a combination of both. And considering Broadcom cards are the built in pNIC adapters for nearly

Advanced Administrator

On Friday, February 7, I sat for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional, Data Center Administration (VCAP5-DCA) exam. Thinking about how I performed has consumed most of my idle hours, so after some reflection over the last week I’ve decided to document a bit of my perspective. I’ll say

Upgrade Lottery

Over the weekend I facilitated a customer upgrade that involved: In place upgrade of Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2 on a vCenter Server. Direct upgrade from View Composer 2.6 to View Composer 5.3. Direct upgrade from VMware View 4.6 to Horizon View 5.3

Round Robin

So you want to set your datastores to Round Robin, but you’ve got multiple hosts, dozens of datastores, and very little time? Just fire up PowerCLI and run this script. Replace “VMCluster” with the name of your cluster. This will change the multi pathing policy on each datastore, on

vExpert 2013

Earlier today, John Mark Troyer announced the 2013 vExpert list. Shockingly, I made the cut, and I’m beyond honored. One of 580. Full disclosure: I originally wrote this entire blog post earlier today from the point of view that I wasn’t included, so I’d have something ready

Using CDP

The other day I was tasked with adding a new VLAN to a customer’s vSphere cluster. The existing network configuration had just the default VM Network setup, with no trunks or tagged port groups setup. In this case the customer is in the process of adding a few virtual

Host Memory

Memory utilization is important in VMware, most of the time it’s the most limiting factor in the virtual to physical consolidation ratio. Often times I’m tasked with assessing how upgradable a physical host’s current memory configuration is. It’s easy to see from the vSphere Client how

Little Megabits

You really should never use 100mb networking with VMware for much of anything. I’m not even sure 100mb networking has any place in a modern datacenter, except maybe cheap connectivity to something like an iLO/DRAC. You should avoid using a single vNIC for any vSwitch, unless you just

View Borked

I’ve been on a View 5.1 deployment with a customer all week, and part of the project involved deploying VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) for View, version 1.01. I’ve done this a couple times before, and had no issues getting the Linux OVA base vApp configured.

VMUG Conference

I used to go to a lot more of the Kansas City VMUG meetings back before I became a consultant (and had more control over my own schedule) but when I saw there would be a full day event (and that the headline speaker would be Steve Woznaik) I made