Category: vSphere

  • 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…)

  • 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

    (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…)

  • VCP 410 Config Maximums Quiz

    I have added a new quiz feature to the site, currently I have a Config Maximums Quiz that can be found here

    It’s currently 49 questions.

    Come back soon for more quizzes.

  • ThinApp – How to virtualise the vSphere Client (4.1u1)

    As promised yesterday here is a quick tutorial showing how to ThinApp the vSphere client, so as to reduce the package size as much as possible the work was carried out on a fully patched Windows XP SP3 machine with the J# redist installed as well.

    The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes so I have edited the video to cut out long and boring installation routines.

    A couple of things to note is that I never managed to get my client down to the same size that VMware have but to my defence this is my first attempt at using ThinApp but I did get it down to a respectable 133mb and also that this is my first attempt at video creation, also this video doesn’t contain any sound but future releases will do.

    One thing missing from the video is that testing of the client was carried out on a Windows 7 virtual machine, this machine had no additional software installed on it (unlike the XP machine that had the J# redist).

    If there are any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

    ThinApp’d vSphere Client 4.1u1 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

  • VMware ThinApp 4.6 Starter Bundle Licensing Issues

    About six months back when VMware had a deal going where if you purchased VMware Workstation you also received a license for VMware ThinApp Starter Bundle I decided to take the plunge and made the purchase (it was also at the time when workstation had a $50 discount going on).

    Before now I hadn’t really had any reason to install ThinApp but recently I had decided to try my hand at packaging up the vSphere client using ThinApp (like VMware have done with the 4.1 release but my aim was to do it with the 4.1u1 release).

    Last night I decided to install ThinApp on a dedicated ThinApp machine (Windows XP SP3) but ran into an issue when it came to actually licensing the application.

    VMware ThinApp

     

    (more…)