Everything-Virtual

Category: Uncategorised

  • Another Year in the Life of Everything-Virtual.com

    A quick run down for 2013

    “The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 52,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    In 2013, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 135 posts.

    The busiest day of the year was July 9th with 320 views. The most popular post that day was Condusiv V-locity VM Testing.”

    Compared to 2012 this is a drop in viewing figures so that just means I need to work harderSmile

    “19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 70,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    In 2012, there were 36 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 90 posts.

    The busiest day of the year was June 1st with 435 views. The most popular post that day was VMware STOP: 0x0000005d Error.”

    All I can say is thanks to my readers for continuing to read my site Smile

    Click here to view the entire report

  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring ESXi Syslog Settings

    In a previous post I installed and configured the Synology Syslog server to allow me to stop me getting the below message on my hosts.

    image

    The reason for the message is that I run my 3 ESXi hosts using SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB keys and as such there is no persistent storage for logs. In this post I am going to show you how to configure some VMware infrastructure to point to our newly configured Syslog server.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Installing the Synology Syslog Server

    In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives

    image

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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).

    image

    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 Synology iSCSI Storage

    In earlier posts we have installed and configured vCenter 5.5 as well as assigning hosts to it, in this next post we are going to configure our iSCSI storage to allow us to later setup Multi-Pathing from our hosts to our storage.

    In my home lab I am using a dedicated Synology DS1513+ for my storage, so let’s go set up the iSCSI LUNs on the Synology.

    02-12-2013 22-03-11

    Log in to the Synology interface with your admin account

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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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  • Veeams’ Ultimate New Year’s Resolution 2014

     

     

     

    Exclusively for the virtualization community, Veeam raffles great prizes that will improve IT Pros daily working experience!

    Join the raffle and be fully equipped for 2014!

    Register now to get one of the following prizes:

    • Tablet of your choice: Android, iPad or Surface
    • Class of your choice: Microsoft Training or VMware Education Services course
    • Event of your choice: TechEd or VMworld in your geography (pass, no travel)
    • Home lab with HP and Netgear products: one mega server, ReadyNAS Pro, SSDs and amazing WiFi router
    • Software kit: MSDN subscription, Veeam NFR licenses and VMware vSphere

    Make sure to register before Dec. 24 to enter raffle!

    You can check out the competition here: http://go.veeam.com/ultimate-new-years-resolution.html

  • Installing the Home Lab – Installing vCenter 5.5 on Windows 2012R2

    This post will detail all the steps required to install vCenter 5.5a on to a Windows 2012R2 guest machine, I should add that at the time of writing 2012R2 isn’t on the supported OS list and that there is an additional step that needs to be done to ensure that the installation succeeds first time.

    You will need to get a copy of OCSetup.exe because for some insane reason Microsoft dropped the use of it in Windows 2012R2 (it’s present in 2012). As a side note you can also use a copy of the file from Windows 2008R2 if you don’t have 2012 available. Once you have a copy place it in the C:\Windows\System32 folder.

    29-09-2013 00-06-5129-09-2013 00-08-0229-09-2013 00-09-04

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  • Installing the Home Lab – VMware Certificates – Part Two

    In the first post in this series we installed the Windows 2012 R2 Root Certificate Authority. This, the second in a series of posts details the configuration of the VMware specific Template and the distribution of the Root CA Certificate.

    VMware Cert Template Creation

    22-11-2013 15-47-26

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  • Installing the Home Lab – VMware Certificates – Part One

    The following post, the first in series of posts, details the installation and configuration of a Windows 2012R2 Enterprise CA to be used with a VMware Infrastructure Home Lab.

    It is assumed at this stage that you have a single host installed and are running a Windows Domain controller.

    As this is a home lab I have chosen to install the CA on to my Domain Controller rather than a dedicated server but if your environment is capable of running a dedicated CA VM then please do so.

    The installation can be carried out either using a PowerShell script or by using the Microsoft Wizard. I have only documented the PowerShell method here but you can use the Wizard if you want instead.

    Use the PowerShell script below to install the CA and Web Enrolment roles.

    Add-WindowsFeature ADCS-Cert-Authority, ADCS-Web-Enrollment -IncludeManagementTools

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