Virtualization: Blue Gears

Get deep and hands-on with virtualization and cloud technologies.

by Edward Haletky

Edward L. Haletky is an Analyst for The Virtualization Practice and owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, and network consulting and development . Edward graduated from Purdue University in 1988 with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. Since then, he has worked with programming graphics and other lower-level libraries on various UNIX platforms. Edward is VMware vExpert, a Guru and moderator for the VMware Discussion Forums providing answers to security and configuration questions. He is the author of multiple books on Virtualization published by Prentice Hall.

vSphere upgrade saga: vCloud Director 5.1

Posted Dec 12, 2012 - 08:28 am

vCloud Director was one of the easiest upgrades but still required some VMware Knowledge Base articles to complete. As always before you do anything you need to "Read the Fine Manual". One misstep may mean starting all over again.
vSphere upgrade saga: Upgrading to vCNS 5.1

Posted Dec 10, 2012 - 03:23 pm

vCNS 5.1 replaces vShield 5.1, and if you do not add new nodes during your installation, you can easily perform all upgrades without removing any components of vShield. vCNS upgrades will upgrade all components of vShield.
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vSphere upgrade saga: vCenter 5.1

Posted Dec 07, 2012 - 03:40 pm

Moving to vCenter 5.1 comes with quite a few caveats and requirements -- and if you make even one mistake you need to start over.
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vSphere upgrade saga: Upgrading HPSIM

Posted Dec 05, 2012 - 12:04 pm

Since an upgrade requires you to reboot each node of your vSphere cluster this is also the perfect time to update any firmware you may need for your systems as recommended by VMware and the hardware vendor.
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vSphere upgrade saga: Getting all the bits

Posted Dec 03, 2012 - 11:16 am

The VMware Enterprise Plus upgrade to vCloud Suite Standard would give me the benefits of being able to make use of vCloud as well as vCNS products in my environment. But before I started the install I had to plan the install, and this produced a long list of software to gather and download.
vSphere upgrade saga: Fixing VMware View

Posted Nov 29, 2012 - 02:58 pm

I recently had an issue where my VMware View instances ceased to talk to my active directory server. As such, I thought they needed to be recomposed, but I also had to upgrade the VMs with a bunch of patches. So being the smart guy I am, I deleted the View desktop VMs and started over. That decision ended up being a disaster and it took me a week to find the root cause of all my problems.
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P2V as a Part of Forensics

Posted Jan 16, 2009 - 05:30 pm

Recent VMware Communities forum discussions have brought Forensics to the fore once again. Even so it has made me think of using virtualization tools to do preliminary analysis -- something that could tell you if the time and effort of full acquisition is required.
Two Vital Resources for Virtualization Administrators

Posted Dec 12, 2008 - 11:22 am

There are now two vital resources for Virtualization Administrators, the VMware Bookshelf and Top Virtualization Security Links.
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VMware HA with ESX v3.5 Update 3

Posted Nov 18, 2008 - 11:52 am

During upgrades there are problems with VMware HA until all hosts in the cluster are at the same update.
Forensics and Dedupe

Posted Nov 10, 2008 - 02:37 pm

Disk deduplication (Dedupe) is a forensically untried solution to the need for more disk space within data centers. Untried does not mean unsound, but until the forensic science can catch up with the technology there may be issues.

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