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).
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.
Having played with a number of different flavours of NAS\SAN software on my HP MicroServer one of the limiting factors I found with Openfiler was the fact you had to install it onto a fixed disk, for the most part this isn’t an issue but when you’re talking about the MicroServer and it’s 4 fixed SATA drives (actually 5 if you want to use the single SATA port designed for a CD\DVD drive) then you can find yourself limited on disk usage if you need to dedicate one of the four drives for the Openfiler OS rather than using it as a RAID member.
I started looking around at the possibility of installing Openfiler onto a USB drive, something that isn’t openly supported on 2.3 and managed to find enough information out there to put together a USB device that can be used for booting Openfiler.
There are a few decisions that need to be made at the offset, mainly on the size USB flash drive to be used, using something too small will cause issues later on, using something too large will obviously just waste space.
For my testing I used a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade which has been a great little device that’s already being used in my vSphere hosts successfully and it fits into the MicroServer very nicely.
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
Day 2 – Storage Deep Dive – Considerations and Best Practices
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).