Everything-Virtual

Category: vSphere

  • VMware Academy Training Experience – vSphere 6 ICM Course with 360GSP

    Over the years I have 360gspexperienced a lot of VMware training, whether that’s been with a VMware VATC (VMware Approved Training Centre), Directly with VMware or via the VMware Academy route.

    My previous VCP 4 and 5 training has been carried out via the Academy route and rarely differed from the usual VATC provided training, the only difference between the Academy and VATC’s in the past was that the Academy could offer weekend training dates and also lasted 8 days instead of the usual 5 days.

    In previous times training with an Academy still meant that you had to sign up for the class on the MyLearn VMware site, had to attend all the lessons and be signed off the class by the instructor, you also received a heavily discounted voucher for the VCP exam and a reasonable time to sit that exam. Again training with a VATC only provided the course attendance and no discounted VCP voucher. This time around I discovered that there has been a change to the way that the course attendance is marked and also an additional benefit that all students should use to aid in their study and understanding of the technology.

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  • 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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  • vMetrics 1.2 Plugin for WordPress – Multiple Cluster Edition

    vmetricsI have been a fan of both Nick Weaver’s WP-vSphereStats and Sean Duffy’s fork of that – vMetrics Plugin for WordPress but one of the things missing from vMetrics was additional Clusters.

    I asked on Twitter if anyone knew how to add that functionality in and Sean kindly responded saying it was hard coded to the WordPress plugin’s PHP but if I had the inclination I could have a look and see if I could add the required functionality, now I should add that I am not a coder, so it was with a little hesitation that I started to look at the code.

    I am pleased to say however that it only took me a couple of hours to butcher Sean’s excellent work to make it display a second cluster, it’s not pretty but it does work.

    Browsing the code should make it fairly obvious what I did to allow me to show a second cluster and I don’t see any issues with adding additional clusters to the output, follow the same train of thought (or if you can do it better) and please let me know (after all, who doesn’t want better \ improved code).

    Please note that I had to make changes to both the WordPress plugin as well as the PowerCLI Updater script, again fairly obvious changes but it works.

    With regards to installation, you should be ok to just over write your existing plugin, if you’re starting from scratch do a manual installation using either the zip file or by directly uploading the extracted files to your plugins folder.

    Change log for version 1.2:

    • Added additional metrics section for second cluster information
    • Updated PowerCLI updater script to allow you to gather and upload second cluster information.
    • Completely made a mess of the previously cleaned up PHP in main plugin code, it’s a mess but it works.

    I am making this available to anyone that want’s it, I have given credit to both Nick Weaver and Sean for their earlier work and ask that anyone moving this forward does the same please.

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  • How to Update or Patch the vCenter 6 Appliance

    With the release yesterday of vCenter 6.0.0b I decided to do a quick post on how to patch your VCSA appliance.

    Please download VCSA patch from here.

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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…)

  • Installing ESXi to a USB key using VMware Workstation 11

    This is an updated post covering VMware Workstation 11 instead of Workstation 9, it’s been updated to cover installing using the formatwithmbr switch during the initial boot process as well as highlighting an issue with creating multiple USB keys from the same VM template.

    This is still the the quickest and easiest method for me to install ESXi on to a host with no local CD\DVD drive.

    Continue to read after the break for the updated build \ preparation process.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – Initial vCenter Configuration

    In previous posts I have demonstrated the installation and initial configuration for the vRealize Operations Manager 6 installation. At the end of the last post we were left at the log on screen to continue the configuration.

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    Log in with the admin user and password and let’s continue after the break to configure vRealize Operations Manager.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Creating and Configuring an iSCSI Distributed Switch for VMware Multipathing

    In an earlier post I configured my Synology DS1513+ Storage server for iSCSI and enabled it for Multi-Pathing, in this post I will show you how to create and configure a vDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) for iSCSI use and how to enable Multipathing to use more than one network path to your storage (there by increasing throughput).

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    Using the vCenter client you can see that in the above screenshot that I have 4 Intel NIC ports on my hosts that aren’t currently assigned to a vswitch.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring Datacenters and Hosts

    In the previous post we installed and configured access to vCenter 5.5, it’s great that we have vCenter installed but with no datacenter or Hosts configured we aren’t going to be doing too much with our new installation so what we need to do is add a new datacenter and a host to allow us to work with the vSphere suite.

    02-12-2013 09-18-25

    Launch the Windows based vCenter Client

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