Everything-Virtual

Category: Virtualisation

  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part Two

    In part one I discussed how I didn’t want to splash out for an Iomega PX6 due to the poor cost performance figures I had seen for it. I had spent a long time before the PX4 and PX6 units actually shipped trying to decide whether to purchase a unit and in the end I decided against it. Having decided to self build a replacement for the Iomega PX6 I needed to decide on hardware, in part 1 I had already decided on the only mini-itx motherboard out there with 6 Sata3 ports on it, the Zotac M880G.

    In part two we will look at case options for the PX6 Replacement unit.

    (more…)

  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part One

    Having owned a couple of the Iomega IX4-200D’s for nearly a year I have been impressed with the build quality of the units, what I haven’t been overly impressed with was the performance of it, don’t get me wrong the IX4 is a home based storage platform and for that it works wonders but as a SAN\NAS storage device to be used as a datastore for my VMware vSphere environment it can cause me issues if I try powering on multiple VM’s at once (obviously I use Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown rules for the most part) I can have serious performance issues.

    When Iomega announced the release of the PX4 and PX6 I was initially pleased with the idea of a 6 drive NAS that was capable of using a mix of SSD and Platter based disks but the more I looked at the PX6 the more I balked at the price when compared to the performance figures I had seen for it. Paying out the £650 (the cheapest I had found the Diskless PX6 out there, including the 20% discounted price that’s available on Simon Seagraves site couldn’t beat that price) started to sound like a bad idea to me.

    I then decided to see if I could actually build a unit for myself (as some of you are aware I have tested a number of NAS\SAN software based solutions out there already) so I did some investigating and surprised myself with how little there is in the way of cheap performance hardware available BUT, saying that I have found out it is possible to build yourself a PX6 replacement NAS device a lot cheaper than it would cost to purchase the Iomega unit. ** I will caveat this here, I understand that the newer IX4 and PX4/6 units out there do offer more than just network storage but for my needs I need a device that can handle both iSCSI and NFS as well as SSD and Platter based disks. It also needed to be able to perform better than the IX4 and HP MicroServer I currently own.

    (more…)

  • Installing Raxco PerfectDisk 12 – vSphere Bundle Trial

    I have been a big fan of the Raxco products for a while now so when I heard that they had a new product about to launch I decided to do a blog post about it.

    Raxco launched PerfectDisk12 in June of this year but have already released two Service Packs for the product (one in each subsequent month), I started testing with build 275 but have now upgraded to the latest release (Build 285).

    (more…)

  • UK VMUG Meeting – 3rd November 2011

    VMUG

    Having attended a couple of #LonVMUG sessions now I knew this was on the cards but in it’s now been officially announced that there is to be a UK VMUG meeting at the the National Motor Cycle Museum on the 3rd of November 2011.


    What is a VMUG you ask? Well it’s a VMware User Group meeting that’s sponsored by companies in the Virtualisation arena and attended by people who work with VMware technologies, it’s a great place to network and meet other like minded people working in different markets and let’s you see how other people are doing things. A lot of the attendees are bloggers, tweeters and the odd author or two or three.

    The event in November is an all day event being run from 08:00 until 17:00 and will feature multiple tracks, keynote speakers and exhibition areas.

    Current sponsors are VMware and HDS (Hitachi Data Systems).

    Registration is now open and can be found on the MyVMUG site, registration is compulsory but free.

  • VMware View 9 Day Bootcamp

    VMware are releasing a 9 day VMware View Bootcamp Series covering all aspects of virtual desktops.

    There will be 9 videos, each video released daily starting on the 19th July.

    Topics covered over the 9 days are :-

    Day 1 – Design Considerations Guidelines for VMware View – Overview

    • Speaker – John Dodge, Sr. Manager PSO Services, VMware
    • Overview of the technical considerations to keep in mind while you’re designing a View environment


    Day 2 – Storage Deep Dive – Considerations and Best Practices

    • Speaker – Jim Yanik, Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware
    • How to design your storage infrastructure to fit your environment
    • Sizing and workload considerations

    (more…)

  • ThinApp’d vSphere Client Error – “The type initializer for ‘xr’ threw an exception”

    I have been using the ThinApp’d version of the vSphere client that I created on my desktop PC rather than installing the thick client, it’s obviously smaller and cleaner and until recently hadn’t caused me any issues.

    I was installing the Xangati OVF and decided to add the vDS (vNetwork Distributed Switch) to my homelab environment when I got this message.

    image

    (more…)

  • Datastore Browser Issue – Unable to browse the contents of any datastore

    I recently came across an issue where I had to remove a Template and add it again because I was getting an error if I tried to edit the settings of it when it was converted back to a VM, the only fix I have found for this has been to remove the VM from the inventory and re-add it via the datastore browser.

    As I haven’t had to do this much (in fact this was the first time I did have to do this) I haven’t come across the particular issue where when I tried to re-add the VM back in to vCenter I tried browsing to my datastore and discovered it was blank.

    DS01

    (more…)

  • VMware VTSP 4 Online Training

    It was recently suggested to me that I take the VTSP (VMware Technical Sales Professional) course, the idea behind this was that the knowledge gained from sitting this course could help with passing my VCP exam.

    The VTSP program is broken down into different areas of expertise, the course I did falls under the Core Knowledge area and is definitely useful for those wanting a little extra assistance with their VCP studies.

    (more…)

  • Configuring Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi to use iSCSI Storage

    On one of the certification forums I post on I saw that one of the members over there was having some trouble configuring iSCSI on both Openfiler and ESXi, whatever he was doing wasn’t allowing him to allocate the storage to the ESXi server.

    In these two videos I will demonstrate how to configure both Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi 4.1 so that you can present the iSCSI volumes as a datastore.

    This first video shows how to configure Openfiler, this includes creating your raid array, configuring volume groups and volumes as well as network access.

    Configuring iSCSI using Openfiler 2.99 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

    This second video shows you how to configure your ESXi server to use the iSCSI storage volume created in the previous video but these same steps are used to configure any iSCSI storage.

    Configuring ESXi to use Openfiler 2.99 iSCSI storage from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

  • vCenter Converter error “the esx host managed by VMware vCenter Server is disconnected”

    I experienced this error today when trying to use vCenter Converter to P2V my Windows Home Server 2011 server to my vSphere cluster, I was getting concerned because the host I was trying to P2V was definitely powered on and working (it’s the host that has my vCenter server on and I was connected to it via the vSphere client).

    (more…)