Everything-Virtual

Category: Uncategorised

  • VMware Certification Offerings

    I was recently asked to list the current VMware certification offerings over on the Certforums website and decided that it can’t hurt to have them listed over here as well.

    VMware have a number of different exam \ certification paths open to individuals now, however initially they only offered a single certification and that was the VCP (VMware Certified Professional), over the years the certification offerings from VMware have grown to where we are currently.
    The following certifications are currently or will be shortly available from VMware, some of these courses have strict class requirements whereas some of them don’t.

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  • Desktop Operating Systems – I moved away from Windows to Ubuntu 12.04

    In my last post I mentioned that I had looked at alternatives to Windows as I wasn’t happy with the direction that Microsoft have taken with Windows 8, don’t get me wrong I really like Windows 7 and think that it’s a great OS but Windows 8 left a lot to be desired where laptop\desktop OS’s were concerned. The last blog post highlighted some issues I was having with the installation of Ubuntu 12.04 taking way too much time and leaving me with a black screen at boot up.

    Move forward a couple of weeks and I have now been running Ubuntu 12.04 in a stable environment with the same hardware as before, this time however what’s changed is that NVidia had released a new driver which made my system way more stable and for the last two weeks I have been happily using Ubuntu as my main OS of choice, sure there are things I miss from my Windows days (SnagIt and Camtasia Studio as well as not being able to play Battlefield 3) but as a whole the experience hasn’t been as bad as it could have been. In addition to the now working NVidia driver my installation times have also drastically reduced down from the many hours I experienced for the first couple of days to about 15 minutes (thank you 50mb cable connection Smile).

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  • Desktop Operating Systems – A move away from Windows??

    I have been a Windows guy from a very early age (actually I was a DOS guy before becoming a Windows guy) and it’s with surprise that I find myself in my current predicament. I recently had a go of the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview and unfortunately found myself really disliking it, don’t get me wrong I think from a tablet point of view it will work wonders but when I sit and watch videos like this you just know that Microsoft have goofed and it’s not just me who has this view on the new Microsoft OS.

    Now I understand that Microsoft haven’t released the final product yet and that things ‘could’ change but tbh I don’t think that Microsoft plan on changing it too much. With this in mind I started looking around at different Operating Systems to use at home, I have a number of different machines around the house doing all sorts and I won’t be changing all of them away from the Microsoft platform. I currently have a Mac Mini that works as my iTunes library for the families iPhones\iPads and a dedicated Management PC for my blogging and VMware lab which will all be staying as they are, that just leaves my gaming rig and my wife’s small Shuttle PC (which she uses for the household budget (YNAB) and gaming (WoW)).

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  • OCZ Technologies – SSD Hardware Failures

    Over the last couple of years OCZ Technologies have gone down the pan where quality control comes in, I have used OCZ products on and off over the years (RAM, CPU Coolers etc) but to date the worst experience I have had with OCZ Technologies has been with their SSD units.

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  • Restoring the IX4 – Firmware and Bootstrap issues

    I was recently sent a request to re-upload my IX4 Acronis image again, this image can be used to image replacement disks to put into an IX4 (as Iomega don’t officially support non Iomega purchased disks). As I no longer had the original TIB file I decided to load up my old 500gb drives (they sit on my shelf gathering dust) and once I was happy that the IX4 didn’t have any fixed IP addresses was going to take an image of the drive and provide it again.

    This is where things started to go wrong, placing the disks into the IX4 they would stick at 95% and wouldn’t go beyond that, in-fact even loading a single drive prompted the same results. It was then that I had an idea, I already figured out that the bootstrap for the IX4 doesn’t actually only reside on the disk (it was the initial assumption when people tried putting blank disks into the IX4), instead the bootstrap is loaded into NVR and then looks at the makeup of the disk and continues to load the disk up if it matches what it expects to see. (more…)

  • vExpert 2012 and beyond

    I recently discovered (accidentily I should add via Twitter) that VMware have awarded me the vExpert title for 2012, this award is based on my previous years contribution to the world of everthing-virtual 🙂 and  is awarded to people who have contributed to the VMware community either through forum posts, VMUG presenting or blogging. I look forward to receiving the email from VMware in the not too distant future 🙂

    I started my blog back in 2010 with the intention of expanding my experience and exposure to the virtualisation market and can honestly say that getting the vExpert was definitely something I was aiming for (admittedly I didn’t think I would get it this year but the blogging and various forums I post to helped my site rankings earlier this year so I had hoped that it would help my chances).

    Having recognition for my contributions to the community is part of the reward I get from blogging and posting on forums and the vExpert to me is the thing that tells me I am doing the right thing.

    I try and put a lot of effort into blogging and whilst I may not be the most prolific of bloggers I hope that what I do contribute help those who need it.

    To ensure that I am not a one hit wonder where the vExpert is concerned I know I need to keep up with what I have been doing so these are some of the things I have planned for the rest of the year.

    • Regular posts on www.Everything-Virtual.com
    • More content on www.My-TechVideos.com
    • Update my VCP and VCA-DT guides to cover more of the exam material
    • Carry on attending the #LONVMUG and #UKVMUG’s and networking with my peers
    • Continuing to post on forums such as www.certforums.com and www.tek-tips.com as well as the VMTN forums and Twitter

  • Installing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 in my Home Lab

    I recently decided to upgrade my vSphere 4 lab to vSphere 5, one of the things I did at the time was consolidate my SQL environments to a single platform (I have in the past had SQL 2005, 2008 and various SQL Express environments up for one reason or another), I decided at this time that I was going to install a dedicated SQL server (VM of course) that would be my single source for any db. requirements.

    I decided to install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as this happens to be the latest supported product (Denali having only just come out I am not sure on the number of the products that support it), like most of my environment SQL 2008 R2 will be hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 server joined to my AD domain.

    Installing SQL 2008 R2 isn’t taxing, for the most part it’s a next next next but there are a couple of caveats that you need to be aware of, especially if you’re going to be using it as the host for any VMware products.

    Using my TechNet subscription I downloaded SQL 2008 R2 to run the installation.

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  • VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2012

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    VMware have just released the public technology preview for VMware Workstation 2012.

    About the Tech Preview

    The VMware Workstation Team is providing public access to the VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2012 to gather real-world feedback from our users.

    This VMware Workstation Technology Preview does not contain major new features, but it does include significant changes to our core virtualization technology. We would appreciate your feedback in the following areas :-

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  • Iomega IX4 – Non Cloud to Cloud Upgrades are not a good idea

    Questions have been asked whether this was possible and for a short period of time Iomega even published instructions on their site on how to do it (but quickly pulled them, more on that later).

    The differences between the non – cloud and cloud edition Iomega IX4’s seem pretty non-existent (I actually couldn’t find any difference apart from the version of EMC LifeLine running between the two devices), so in theory it should have been possible to upgrade the older IX4 to the newer version of the OS.

    When Iomega released the new version of the IX4 software to fix the issues with the OSX Time Machine not running correctly if you had updated to Lion I decided to have a look at the feasibility of upgrading to the cloud edition on one of my test devices.

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  • Installing Windows 8 Customer Preview on VMware Workstation 8

    Last week Microsoft launched the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, rather than installing the preview onto any of my existing hardware I decided to give it a go on VMware Workstation 8 before trusting it to a dedicated machine.

    As this is pre-release software Microsoft advise that there may well be bugs and application compatibility issues (another reason to give it a go on a VM) but generally speaking and after experiencing the Windows 7 preview when that released I am sure that this will be fairly straight forward (the Customer Preview can generally be viewed as a RC with this being close to what the RTM release would look like (unless there are some very serious bugs discovered during testing of this release)).

    The recommended specs for running the Windows 8 Customer Preview are :-

    1 GHz or faster processor
    1 GB RAM for the 32-bit release or 2 GB RAM for the 64-bit release
    16 GB available hard disk space for 32-bit or 20 GB for the 64-bit
    DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

    The Windows 8 Consumer Preview can be downloaded free from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/consumer-preview or via your Technet or MSDN subscriptions.

    Follow the step by step process below to successfully install the Windows 8 customer preview on VMware Workstation 8.

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