Everything-Virtual

Category: VMware

  • VMware Workstation 8 Released

    I have used VMware Workstation 7 for the last year or so and I have been really impressed with it (as a solution for virtualisation on my laptop rather than my in-house lab). So when VMware announced the release of VMware Workstation 8 today I immediately purchased the upgrade.

    The upgrade purchase process was very easy and the upgrade site automatically populated the previous versions serial number which allowed me to purchase the upgrade product at the reduced price of $99 or £67.55 instead of the usual price of $199 or £135.50.

    Installation took about 10 minutes on my Dell E6410 and unlike my Acronis upgrades didn’t require entering the previous product key to carry out the installation.

    image

    Some of the blurb on the improved VMware Workstation product.

  • Run over 600 different operating systems right on your PC. Prove your mastery of the PC and run from DOS to Windows 7
  • Run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine with 8 virtual processors or 8 virtual cores, 2 TB virtual disks and up to 64 GB of memory per virtual machine
  • Move to the internal cloud. Build and test your virtual machines locally and then drag and drop to move them directly to VMware vSphere
  • Remotely connect to virtual machines running on VMware vSphere anywhere on your network to leverage not only your local PC but the internal cloud
  • Run as a server to share virtual machines with your team, department, or anyone in your organization with enterprise calibre control over user access
  • and much more.

  • VMware VCP 5 (VCP 511) Training Requirements – Updated

    VMware recently updated the requirements for the VCP 5 upgrade, for a limited time VCP3’s can now upgrade to the VCP5 by attending the What’s New (5.0) course, like the earlier requirements this also has a best before date of Feb 29th 2012.

    VMW-VCP5-105c

    The VCP 511 Exam Blueprint can be found here

  • 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).

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  • 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

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  • VMware VCP 5 (VCP 511) Training Requirements

    As vSphere 5 has now been announced the training and certification requirements also been released.

    The good news is that as with previous releases there is a grace period for all current VCP holders to upgrade their certification to VCP5 5 and that grace period is somewhat decent, currently there is no course requirement until Feb 29th 2012.

    As with previous VCP exams there is a requirement for all new VCP’s to attend an authorised course prior to being awarded the VCP 5 accreditation.

    The VCP 511 Exam Blueprint can be found here

  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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.

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  • 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.