A Couple of Things
So I know that it has been quite a while since I have posted anything. Needless to say that we all have things that come up in our lives that keep us from d...
So I know that it has been quite a while since I have posted anything. Needless to say that we all have things that come up in our lives that keep us from d...
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am not quite sure why but I decided to change the look of my site again. I know that I was not on the old design for long but I just felt it was lacking. ...
So I have been asked by a few people,
So for a little while I have noticed that I could not get the VMware Client Integration Plugin to work for v6.0. I had tried on multiple Mac machines that I...
Most of you know that I am a Principal Consultant/Architect for a VAR in Texas. If you didn’t know that then now you do…any-who…I am often receiving emails ...
So today marks the day where I start my journey migrating off of wpEngine and moving to GitHub Pages. During this transition please bare with me as I get th...
So it has been a minute since my last post and I hate that this is my newest one…OK…so maybe I don’t hate it! Anyway, the session voting is open for the pub...
The other day we noticed some odd behavior from some blades in a somewhat large environment. The environment is a mix of B200 M3 and B440 M2 blades. The od...
Figured I would post this since it didn’t seem that this was documented anywhere. This is in regards to utilizing a vCenter Group for authentication into th...
I came across an interesting bug today when deploying a linked-mode vCenter and SSO in High-Availability mode. The installation of SSO, Inventory Service, a...
One of the cool things about doing new installations is the ability to pick up on some of the latest gotchas. During a recent deployment of a greenfield I c...
As a few of you know, I recently sat the VCAP5-DCA while in Barcelona at VMworld Europe. I wanted to post a little information about the experience and poin...
So here it is…the last day of the conference. I have put together the final footage for the short last day of the conference in Barcelona. I really hope th...
On with the series, I bring another day of the conference, through my eyes. We go and check out the session hall and get a tour of the Hands-On Labs area fr...
So here is the first of my series, Operation: Through My Eyes, for VMworld Barcelona 2013. This day was mostly the Solutions Exchange. Come walk the VMworl...
So while sitting at the airport this morning I came up with a great idea for a blog series. It was a combination of blog/vlog/pov type postings. I want to ...
As many of you know, what drives innovation is the voice of the community and people using the products provided to us by companies like VMware. There are t...
So just before I finish everything up and finish packing, I wanted to make everyone aware of a very cool contest happening this year at VMworld. Greg Stuart...
Check out my first guest post at vDestination.com: http://vdestination.com/2013/07/10/the-key-to-the-future-of-the-software-defined-data-center/
I am very excited to announce that I had a session accepted for presentation at both VMworld US and EMEA this year! I will be presenting with my good friend...
Ladies and gentlemen, the VMworld 2013 Session Voting has begun! I have submitted a couple of sessions both by myself and with some fellow colleagues. You ...
When sitting around today thinking about the grand scheme of things for my future state architecture, I was presented with a question from a co-worker about ...
Disclaimer: Use at your own risk! Be smart and contact VMware GSS if this is a production environment! This was in my lab so your mileage may var...
Looks like I will be speaking at VMworld on a panel session with Thomas Corfmat, Igor Stoyanov, Sean Harrison, and Vivienne Cleveland:
Last year Greg Stuart over at vDestination.com gave away a free trip to VMworld 2011. It looks like he has done it again with the aid of Veeam, TrainSignal,...
So this year I have a couple of topics that I and a couple of others (Cody Bunch, Joerg Lew) have turned into for the Call for Papers. User voting for the t...
In response to Cody Bunch’s recent post on Testing DPM with PowerCLI, I decided to translate this into a vCO workflow. I did this because I thought it would...
Much to my surprise, VMworld 2012 CFP is now open (http://www.vmworld.com/thread/5311). I will be submitting a few topics with a couple of my vCO buds. I w...
On Sunday, April 15, 2012, VMware released the information regarding the 2012 VMware vExpert Recipients here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2012/04/announcin...
So I decided to remediate my vCO vApp to the latest version, 4.2.1. Everything went smooth after attaching the baseline that I created to upgrade it through...
So a couple of weeks ago I was contacted after offering to help with the Houston VMUG and asked if I was willing to take over as Leader of the group. Shocke...
Now that we have a completely working automation workflow with some cool little auto-generated stuff in it, we can move to the presentation of the workflow. ...
While learning how to use vCO for automating tasks within my virtual environments I came across the need to auto-generate or auto-populate certain portions o...
Stay tuned this week as I publish Part 4 and Part 5 of the vCenter Orchestrator: Operation Automate series!
Now that wait wasn’t so bad, was it? Anywho, today we will look at turning this Visio diagram looking thing into a working automation workflow. In the prev...
So another day, another piece of the workflow! Today we will be generating input parameters, and workflow attributes. There are a few ways to do this but I...
As promised, here is the first of a series of post regarding using VMware vCenter Orchestrator to add a new host to vCenter and later in another workflow, de...
I was notified today by Rackspace that my web server cluster will be experiencing an outage tomorrow, Saturday March 3, 2012 between 12:01AM and 1:30AM CST. ...
Well, with the new year comes change (Yes I know it is already the end of February!). With this in mind, I have decided it was time to change the design of ...
First, I want to thank the vCOteam for their help and all the others on the VMTN forums that helped me learn more about vCO and what it can do. Secondly, I ...
So one of our community well-known and appreciated people has found a way to make someone’s year a special one. Cody Bunch over at ProfessionalVMware.com ha...
So there has been a spark of another conversation regarding the VMTN Subscription. For those of you who are unaware of what this is/was, it was a service si...
The VMTN Blog has posted an interview with me as part of a series of posts focusing on VMware vExperts and their journey in IT. I am honored to be a part of...
It looks like the wait is completely over. VMware has made available vSphere 5 for download. Here is the download page:
Today marks the birthday of vSential.com. On August 5, 2010, vSential.com was created and brought online to bring good content on virtualization to the wond...
On July 27, 2011 VMware announced a new licensing purchase program dubbed the VMware Volume Purchasing Program or VPP for short. The VPP was created as a po...
I know that everyone is looking for a way to get a grip on the future license costs involved with going to vSphere 5 in the future. Rynardt Spies over at Vi...
While everyone was excited to hear about the next generation of the dominating hypervisor, one particular piece has held a cloud (no pun intended!) over the ...
Holy free stuff! I am truly amazed at this wonderful chance for those of you out there that want to go to VMworld. My fellow vExpert and virtualization blo...
I am happy to push more on the announcement of Scott Lowe’s new book, Mastering VMware vSphere 5. I have always been a huge fan of Scott’s books. As a matt...
Another day that VMware has “raised the bar” for the virtualization community. Today those of us who were online for the live event received a skim of the n...
So in celebration of the big #VMwareCloud event and the recent honor bestowed upon me, I have decided to change up the site a bit…well…a bunch! The entire s...
I hope everyone is just as excited as I am regarding the upcoming “Raising the Bar” online event. Here is the information posted on the VMTN Blog:
I got up this morning and was filing through my e-mail only to find one from Mr. John Troyer. The e-mail stated that he was welcoming me to the 2011 VMware ...
Well, I have officially vMotion’d myself from one company to another within the same city and state. I will be taking a longer hiatus than expected so I can...
Today I was approached by one of my coworkers and was asked,
This past weekend I was faced with a challenge of moving from an old unsupported SAN on a 3.5 deployment to a new supported SAN and a new 4.1 deployment. I ...
So with the New Year here, vSential.com has overgone a makeover of some sort. There are definitely more things that need to be looked into and resolved but ...
Something I came across today that struck me as funny while doing my daily VMware Community posting:
One of the recent things that I have come across are posts in the community forums regarding memory metrics or memory counters. People are always asking que...
Cody Bunch over at ProfessionalVMware posted yet another good article for us vGeeks. I, personally, have not run into this yet but I imagine I will soon. C...
“Robin, go carve me out a new LUN for our new Batworks Monitoring System!”, says Batman. Robin replies, “It is ready for you Batman, let’s get monitoring th...
I came across a great video by David Davis at VMwareVideos.com about ESXi 4.1 Lockdown Mode and the new Total Lockdown Mode. ESXi lockdown mode is designed ...
Back in September, Cody Bunch at ProfessionalVMware.com, had posted an article regarding an e-mail he had received from one of his readers about vApps. Besi...
With all of the debate going on with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, it seems that some companies in the SMB market are starting to take on Hyper-V. C...
I was going through my nightly reading and came across a great article at vKnowledge about application consistent quiescing. Since there are many companies ...
It seems that VMware has finally determined and announced the end of life for ESX Classic! The fate of the Service Console is now eminent…With the release o...
The other day we noticed some odd behavior from some blades in a somewhat large environment. The environment is a mix of B200 M3 and B440 M2 blades. The od...
I came across an interesting bug today when deploying a linked-mode vCenter and SSO in High-Availability mode. The installation of SSO, Inventory Service, a...
So I decided to remediate my vCO vApp to the latest version, 4.2.1. Everything went smooth after attaching the baseline that I created to upgrade it through...
As a few of you know, I recently sat the VCAP5-DCA while in Barcelona at VMworld Europe. I wanted to post a little information about the experience and poin...
As I start gearing up for my VCP-410 exam I decided I would post my progress and information regarding each objective as I go through them. I know that ther...
So I have been asked by a few people,
So today I ran across an interesting issue after deciding to upgrade the vCenter Server Appliance in my lab environment. After applying the upgrade patches ...
So let us continue down the path of the various commands to help troubleshooting. We have been down the path of the VXLAN via esxcli, NSX Controller and Log...
As you continue through your journey with NSX you will eventually want to or be forced to (by requirement) to utilize the logical routing and bridging functi...
So to add to my last post on troubleshooting VXLAN through esxcli, I will now move into troubleshooting and gathering information from the NSX Controller ins...
So with the release of VMware’s NSX™ product, some of us may have already started down that road of playing with it in our labs. VMware NSX™ is the network ...
I decided to provide an extension on the last post I did, Creating OrgNetworks in vCloud Director 5.1 with PowerCLI. I had a need for being able to export O...
So I know I haven’t posted in a little while anything truly useful…well, hopefully, that changes with this one. I was approached by a colleague with a need ...
Ran across something and needed to be able to check to see what vDC’s had Fast-Provisioning enabled in my lab. Here is a quick one-liner to list them and if...
So I ran into an issue the other day regarding host disconnects within vCenter in a vCD environment. SSH’d into the host and noticed right off the bat that ...
So I have run into a few issues where trying to delete a vApp with Partially Powered Off VMs live inside the vApp. It seems to place the vApp and VM into a ...
When sitting around today thinking about the grand scheme of things for my future state architecture, I was presented with a question from a co-worker about ...
Disclaimer: Use at your own risk! Be smart and contact VMware GSS if this is a production environment! This was in my lab so your mileage may var...
So after my last post about the VMware Fusion and AutoLab goodness, I was pinged by Alastair Cooke on Twitter about possibly writing up the documentation for...
I have noticed that you can’t find much about installing the AutoLab on a Mac running VMware Fusion. Here are some notes on getting it going. The first thi...
In response to Cody Bunch’s recent post on Testing DPM with PowerCLI, I decided to translate this into a vCO workflow. I did this because I thought it would...
I was in need of automatically renaming a generic datastore name in one of my host deployment workflows and found that the renameDatastore() method was depre...
So today I was running some workflows that will be needed in the next week or so and found that they suddenly did not work in Webviews or Perspectives. The ...
So I decided to remediate my vCO vApp to the latest version, 4.2.1. Everything went smooth after attaching the baseline that I created to upgrade it through...
Now that we have a completely working automation workflow with some cool little auto-generated stuff in it, we can move to the presentation of the workflow. ...
While learning how to use vCO for automating tasks within my virtual environments I came across the need to auto-generate or auto-populate certain portions o...
Now that wait wasn’t so bad, was it? Anywho, today we will look at turning this Visio diagram looking thing into a working automation workflow. In the prev...
So another day, another piece of the workflow! Today we will be generating input parameters, and workflow attributes. There are a few ways to do this but I...
As promised, here is the first of a series of post regarding using VMware vCenter Orchestrator to add a new host to vCenter and later in another workflow, de...
First, I want to thank the vCOteam for their help and all the others on the VMTN forums that helped me learn more about vCO and what it can do. Secondly, I ...
So after playing around with my latest vCenter 5 installation I found that my logs were filling up with the following:
It looks like HP and Emulex have finally worked out their differences with their CIM providers. As some of you will remember, you were unable to install Emu...
Some people have asked how to enable SNMP on ESXi 5. The process is identical to how you would on ESXi 4.x. Here’s how:
So I have started laying out the beginnings of the new vSphere 5 infrastructure at my work. Got a couple of hosts laid out, vCenter built up, and dotting my...
So we have all seen the wonderful cloning or deploying from template of a SLES VM and suddenly the network interface changes to eth1 and you have no network ...
So the company I work for had a deployment scenario in place for there remote branches utilizing VMware Server 2 prior to me coming onboard. I was tasked wi...
I have seen quite a few people wondering if there is a way to enable TSM from the vSphere Client. I would have to say, “YES THERE IS!” VMware posted a KB Art...
I ran into an issue today when patching a couple of standalone ESXi hosts. There were no VMs built out on these hosts yet so I took the quick second to updat...
This past weekend I was faced with a challenge of moving from an old unsupported SAN on a 3.5 deployment to a new supported SAN and a new 4.1 deployment. I ...
I decided to gather some information about a server that was sitting in Morgantown, PA due to a couple of errors we were receiving. I needed to get it prett...
There was a question posted on the VMware Community Forums regarding the ability to increase the number of hostd log files. Here is the solution I provided:
Eric Gray from vCritical posted a good article in regards to the usage of SLES for VMware and installing VMware Tools. Since the release of SLES for VMware,...
I have the handy vCalendar by Jason Boche sitting on my desk here at work and as I was tearing through the days of this weekend I came across one tidbit that...
Now that people are starting to build out vRealize Automation 7 in some environments, we find that we need to use some of the new features, or at least, we w...
I decided to provide an extension on the last post I did, Creating OrgNetworks in vCloud Director 5.1 with PowerCLI. I had a need for being able to export O...
So I know I haven’t posted in a little while anything truly useful…well, hopefully, that changes with this one. I was approached by a colleague with a need ...
So the company I work for had a deployment scenario in place for there remote branches utilizing VMware Server 2 prior to me coming onboard. I was tasked wi...
```powershell @” =============================================================================== Title: Report-Snaphots.ps1 Description: List...
``` @” =============================================================================== Title: Report-Datastores.ps1 Description: Report Datastore usage for a...
After pulling together some different resources from the likes of Alan Renouf, Luc Dekens, Eric Sloof, and others in the PowerCLI community (Forgive me if I ...
Over at Professional VMware, Cody Bunch posts a pretty useful PowerCLI one-liner to rescan all HBA’s.
Here is a script that I use to gather some size data and spit out a spreadsheet listing name and VMDK size.
Looks like I will be speaking at VMworld on a panel session with Thomas Corfmat, Igor Stoyanov, Sean Harrison, and Vivienne Cleveland:
So for those of us who have experienced the wonderful times of dealing with replacing or updating certificates within our VMware infrastructures, VMware came...
So after my last post about the VMware Fusion and AutoLab goodness, I was pinged by Alastair Cooke on Twitter about possibly writing up the documentation for...
I have noticed that you can’t find much about installing the AutoLab on a Mac running VMware Fusion. Here are some notes on getting it going. The first thi...
We all know that one of the biggest performance killers in our virtual environments is the wonderful alignment of partitions so that they may work in harmony...
So the company I work for had a deployment scenario in place for there remote branches utilizing VMware Server 2 prior to me coming onboard. I was tasked wi...
One of my favorite virtualization backup companies is about to mark another day to bring new features and take the backup world to the next level…Veeam Backu...
So we all know who the big players in the VMware virtualization backup game are…Veeam, vRanger, PHDvirtual…to name a few of the more common ones. A new one ...
I know that everyone is looking for a way to get a grip on the future license costs involved with going to vSphere 5 in the future. Rynardt Spies over at Vi...
``` @” =============================================================================== Title: Report-Datastores.ps1 Description: Report Datastore usage for a...
This past weekend I was faced with a challenge of moving from an old unsupported SAN on a 3.5 deployment to a new supported SAN and a new 4.1 deployment. I ...
After pulling together some different resources from the likes of Alan Renouf, Luc Dekens, Eric Sloof, and others in the PowerCLI community (Forgive me if I ...
Dudley Smith has released the latest version of his ESX/ESXi Connections and Ports Diagram. It is a PDF formatted for printing in poster size (2’x3’)…This i...
So for a little while I have noticed that I could not get the VMware Client Integration Plugin to work for v6.0. I had tried on multiple Mac machines that I...
So let us continue down the path of the various commands to help troubleshooting. We have been down the path of the VXLAN via esxcli, NSX Controller and Log...
As you continue through your journey with NSX you will eventually want to or be forced to (by requirement) to utilize the logical routing and bridging functi...
So to add to my last post on troubleshooting VXLAN through esxcli, I will now move into troubleshooting and gathering information from the NSX Controller ins...
So with the release of VMware’s NSX™ product, some of us may have already started down that road of playing with it in our labs. VMware NSX™ is the network ...
Looks like VMware listened to all of the negative feedback and lashings they received from their customer base regarding the new vRAM Entitlement licensing m...
In response to Cody Bunch’s recent post on Testing DPM with PowerCLI, I decided to translate this into a vCO workflow. I did this because I thought it would...
Now that we have a completely working automation workflow with some cool little auto-generated stuff in it, we can move to the presentation of the workflow. ...
While learning how to use vCO for automating tasks within my virtual environments I came across the need to auto-generate or auto-populate certain portions o...
Now that wait wasn’t so bad, was it? Anywho, today we will look at turning this Visio diagram looking thing into a working automation workflow. In the prev...
So another day, another piece of the workflow! Today we will be generating input parameters, and workflow attributes. There are a few ways to do this but I...
As promised, here is the first of a series of post regarding using VMware vCenter Orchestrator to add a new host to vCenter and later in another workflow, de...
First, I want to thank the vCOteam for their help and all the others on the VMTN forums that helped me learn more about vCO and what it can do. Secondly, I ...