Everything-Virtual

Category: Home Labs

  • Condusiv Technologies V-locity 5 Testing

    I have been running the Condusiv Technologies V-locity 5 software on a couple of test machines in my home lab over the last couple of days, alongside those VMs I also ran a couple of VM’s with the older V-locity VM product to see how performance differed.

    Testing on both products still takes a few days but there are a couple of differences in how the performance data is presented at the end of the test.

    In the previous version you ran a Benefit Analysis Report to show you before and after information which generated a nice PDF that you could save, this PDF gave you a page full of information that made for very easy reading.

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  • V-locity 5 Install and Configuration

    So I was recently offered the chance to test drive V-locity 5 to see how it compared against the previous V-locity VM product that I tested nearly two years ago, one of the big differences between the two products is that this time I am using the V-locity Management Console (VMC) as my centralised management and deployment tool.

    This post covers the installation and configuration of the VMC and the deployment of agents via it.

    One of the first things I noticed after downloading the installation file from the Condusiv Technologies website was that the new package came in quite a lot smaller in size than the previous version, I mean like about 50% smaller, now considering this includes the VMC as well as the V-locity package you have to hand it to the developers with regards to size reduction.

    Supported Platforms for the VMC and V-locity agents, as you can see you’re not restricted to either physical or virtual for either the VMC or agents.

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  • Condusiv V-locity 5 Testing

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    Nearly two years ago I was given the opportunity to take out the Condusiv Technologies V-locity VM version 4 product for a spin in my home lab, the results were pretty positive and certainly something I would suggest to anyone running a Windows estate to investigate.

    Move forward a couple of years and I was contacted by their technical director after having filled out an online questionnaire, he remembered my blog articles and wondered if I wanted to take the new version of V-locity 5 out for a spin to see how it compared, V-locity 5 now combines both the V-locity VM and V-locity Server products under one product banner.

    V-locity is an I/O reduction software solution that increases application performance in virtual, physical and cloud environments by 50% or more without the cost of additional hardware

  • Dramatically Faster Application Performance
  • Target Applications
  • Performance Validation
  • Seamless Deployment and Management (more…)

  • VMware Flash Read Cache Installation

    In my home lab I decided to install 3 SanDisk SDSSDP-128G-G25 SSD’s for VMware’s Flash Read Cache, this lets you accelerate virtual machine performance through the use of host resident flash devices as a read cache. Now please understand that these drives aren’t on the HCL so your mileage may vary.

    I have a full page dedicated to Flash Read Cache being prepared for my VCAP 5.5 Guide so I won’t do the whole thing here.

    Finally this post was initially created using vSphere 5.5 but the steps are identical when completing the work on a vSphere 6 environment.

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  • Creating a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template – Updated for Deployment Fix

    I have created a new post here that details the most up to date information for CentOS 7.x Templates.

     

    I have documented how to create a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template for all the non-Linux admins out there. centos7

    Following the instructions below will yield a template ready for future installs that ensures you can deploy at speed.

    All told this should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

    I have amended the post with details on how to fix the guest customisation issues that I was experiencing before.

    I can now successfully deploy new VM’s from the template.

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  • Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 – Installing SCCM 2012 R2 and CU4

    In the first three posts of my SCCM 2012 R2 posts I covered the Active Directory, SQL and Windows requirements to install Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 in a lab environment.

    SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 1 Covered Active Directory and Schema Extensions
    SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 2 Covered SQL 2012 Additional Feature Installs (Reporting Services)
    SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 3 Covered the Windows 2012R2 Requirements for SCCM 2012 R2, this includes IIS, WSUS and ADK

    In part 4 I cover the installation of SCCM 2012 R2 and the recently released Cumulative Update 4 (CU4).

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  • Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 – Pre-Requisite Installs Part 3

    In the first two posts on this multi-part blog post about installing Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 I covered the pre-requisites for Active Directory and SQL Server (Reporting Services). In Part 3 I am covering the requirements for the Windows OS for the SCCM 2012 R2 Site Server.

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  • Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 – Pre-Requisite Installs Part 2

    In Part 1 of this multi-part post I detailed the Active Directory requirements for installing SCCM 2012 R2, in this post is the SQL Installation. In my lab I am going to be running this from an already existing SQL 2012 instance and I just needed to add the Reporting Services component to my installation, however the installation routine for adding the Reporting Services is somewhat similar for a new SQL installation and where it’s different I will let you know.

    I know I said that Part 2 would contain the Windows OS requirements for the SCCM 2012 R2 installation but this has proven to be a bit longer than I expected.

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  • Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 – Pre-Requisite Installs Part 1

    With an ever expanding Windows estate in my lab (and being a former Microsoft SCCM Engineer) I decided that rather than downloading Microsoft patches to every single server in my lab I would install SCCM 2012 R2 and utilise a single source for my downloads. Now sure I could have just gone down the WSUS route but as I haven’t actually played with SCCM 2012 (or R2) I decided to have a play with that instead.

    The next couple of blog posts are going to detail the installation of the pre-requisites for SCCM 2012 R2 (Active Directory, SQL and the SCCM Host Pre-Reqs) as well as the actual SCCM 2012 Installation.

    For obvious reasons I am going to use a couple of posts as this isn’t a simple double click to install.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – One or more ports are experiencing network contention

    Having installed vRealize Operations Manager a couple of times recently in my home lab I came across an error that initially caused me to rip out the lab and build it again changing the way my networking was being done. Why? Well the following error was being presented to me when I logged in to the Operations Manager console.

    2015-01-24_21-13-16

    In a home lab environment this confused me because, well it’s a home lab environment and there wasn’t a lot going on (I had 5 VMs running across three hosts at the time).

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