So with the release of ESXi 5.5 I decided to follow my previous instructions and upgrade my hosts using the esxcli commands.
1. Place the Host into Maintenance Mode and ensure that there are no running VM’s on the host.
2. Ensure you have SSH enabled
3. Make sure that the Outbound HTTP rule is enabled, either by using the console or via the command line later on (command line is esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient )
VMware have just released a slew of desktop virtualisation products in the last 24 hours, they have released VMware Workstation 10, VMware Fusion 6, VMware Fusion 6 Pro, VMware Player and VMware Player 6 Plus.
Key new features include:
Pricing and availability
All are now available to purchase in full or as an upgrade.
Please click on the images above to go to the Product, Full product and Upgrade Product pages.
VMware have announced updates to their vCloud Suite product.
VMware have extended the number of products that are included in the vCloud Suite 5.5, this includes vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) availability in all editions rather than just the Enterprise Suite. Prior to this announcement vCloud Automation Center came in a single version, however the announcement let’s us know that we now have Standard, Advanced and Enterprise versions available.
vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security are not sold as standalone products anymore.
All editions of the vCloud Suite now include automation features (offered by vCAC) and Operations Management (using vCOPS).
One of the things that VMware hadn’t followed up was their Associate certification offerings, when they first announced the VCA4 DT exam a couple of years ago there was a hope that VMware would offer further exams but for the last couple of years they haven’t. That’s just changed 
VMware have just announced the availability of more VMware Certified Associate level certifications (VCA). Like the earlier VMware VCA4 DT certification there are no mandatory training course or pre-reqs for the VCA exams but there are recommended FREE on-line training courses which can be taken for the exam preparation.
There are currently 3 exams which are available now for registration with the VCA-NV exam coming soon.
Below are the VMware Certified Associate which are available:
More information about the new certification can be found on the VMware Certification page and the VMware Certfication Road Map
VMware has just announced the vSphere 5.5 product at VMworld 2013. Here are the new features and enhancements.
vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
Virtual Machine Enhancements
VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
vSphere Storage Enhancements
vSphere Networking Enhancements
More details can be found in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 Platform Guide
After a recent upgrade to our vCenter 5.1 infrastructure we discovered that we were getting the following error when trying to use the log browser component of the web client.
Having tried a number fixes from the usual sources (Derek Seamans excellent blog) none of them seemed to resolve the issue, a reboot of the infrastructure, a re-install of the Web Client all resulted in the same error cropping up. In the end it took the eyes of a VMware BCS Engineer to have a look at our ca_certificates.crt file and discover some white space present.
The strange thing here is that there wasn’t any date change on the file since the initial deployment back last year and we had no issues with the log browser working before the upgrade.
If you experience any issues with the log browser it may be worth checking the C:\ProgramData\VMware\SSL\ca_certificates(_2).crt file to make sure that there isn’t any white space present in the file first.
During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).
They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.
V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-
What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).
I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.
It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.
Came across a little issue today when trying to install the vShield Endpoint on to a number of our ESXi hosts today, with the hosts evacuated I clicked on the vShield tab to install the Endpoint onto the host and came across the message “Not applicable to ESX version below 4.1 Patch 3”, strange as we are running ESXi 5.1 on the hosts 
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I am happy to announce that for a second year in a row I have been awarded the vExpert 2013. I wasn’t sure I had done enough blogging on my site over last year but then realised that it wasn’t just my blogging but also my moderation duties over at http://certforums.com that helped my chances. I run several blogs about Technology as I usually document installation guides\technical fixes and how to guides for various different products, I use my own site to assist me with obscure issues that occasionally crop up. With a family and long working days it’s not an easy thing to maintain but having a laptop\tablet and connection to my homelab certainly allows me to blog on the move.
To give you an idea of numbers, over 1000 people applied for the vExpert award this year, only 580 succeeded in being awarded, in John Troyers words :-
There were a lot of very smart, very accomplished people, even VCDXs, that weren’t named as vExpert this year.
I will continue to blog and post on the various forums I attend so please continue to visit regularly.
I would also like to congratulate all the new and renewed vExperts for 2013, especially Andrey and Craig, two of my fellow Certforum colleagues.
Whilst doing some work on one of our Windows 2008 R2 templates (AV Upgrade) I discovered that we had an issue with the network being un plugged and not connecting, it turns out that the template had recently been Storage vMotion to a different data store and since then wouldn’t allow the vNIC to connect to the network.
