Virtualization Archives

9 Things You’ll Love About vSphere 6.0

February 2, 2015 by Bob Plankers

vSphere 6.0, finally. It’s been in beta for what seems like an eternity. Betas are like Fight Club, where the first rule of participation is that you may not talk about your participation. But today’s the day that changes, as VMware just announced 6.0. A lot of rough edges were smoothed in this release, and all the limits have increased again (64 hosts per cluster, etc.). Beyond that, though, there’s much to like. Here are nine things I think are pretty neat about 6.0. 1. Centralized Services (PSC, Content Library, Update Manager) VMware has acknowledged that there’s a fair amount of “meta-administration” (my term) that goes on for vSphere. To help curb that they’ve created the Platform Services Controller, which is …

Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

January 24, 2015 by Bob Plankers

I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

January 16, 2015 by Bob Plankers

We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

Table Stakes for Storage Arrays

January 9, 2015 by Bob Plankers

I was just looking at Andreas Lesslhumer’s post about blog posting volume in the virtualization community, and it’s depressing. I didn’t blog a whole lot here last year. Why was that? Because I was writing elsewhere! Speaking of that, the first half of my “Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015” list is up over at The Virtualization Practice, wherein I outline what the table stakes are for enterprise storage arrays, get only slightly snarky about why we’re still discussing, as an industry, why & how to use flash, and highlight the good work some vendors are doing (SolidFire, Dell, and Tintri in this post, more in next week’s second part). Check it out.

You Cannot Use open-vm-tools to Customize VMs

January 6, 2015 by Bob Plankers

Homer Simpson: Kids: there’s three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way? Homer Simpson: Yeah, but faster! My biggest pet peeve with open source is that projects don’t ever solve whole problems. They get 60% of the way to solving a whole problem and then run off to chase another squirrel. The most recent example of this is VMware’s recommendation to use the open-vm-tools packages that ship with modern distributions of Linux. Dumbest recommendation ever. Why? Because the project got to 60% of the solution and stopped, effectively solving no problems for anybody. From what appears to be a VMware employee on the open-vm-tools mailing list archives: > …

CentOS 7 Refusing VMware vSphere Guest OS Customizations

January 6, 2015 by Bob Plankers

So I just spent two hours of my life trying to get my CentOS 7 VM template to deploy correctly with a vSphere customization specification. No matter what I did it would customize the VM, then uncustomize it, essentially leaving me with the template again. I finally asked our oracle and savior, Google, and two amazing things occurred. First, I found the answer. About three weeks ago a fellow named Jeff Burns asked this same question on Server Fault, then answered his own question five minutes later (this is often what happens to me immediately upon filing a support case). He built on something I’d seen in /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log, where the VMware Tools couldn’t figure out what the OS is and …

The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The Way It Is

December 1, 2014 by Bob Plankers

I hate purists. You know the type. They’re in all IT shops, in all projects. They’re the people who won’t do any work unless they know exactly how it’ll all look in the end. They research, endlessly. They’re pedantic. They sit and poke holes in your work, claiming that they’re just playing Devil’s advocate. They rarely start an answer with “it depends,” opting instead for condescending phrases like “if I were you” or “if it were up to me.” And they wouldn’t know a minimum viable product if it bit them in the duff. Nobody knows how a project or product is going to look in the end. And even if you do have a great vision, nobody really knows the …

Coho Data Giving Away a VMworld US 2014 Pass

July 25, 2014 by Bob Plankers

If you’re trying to get to VMworld US and want a free pass, a number of vendors are giving them away, including my friends over at Coho Data: We are giving away a FULL conference pass to VMworld 2014 to one lucky winner along with a few goodies to others as well. Register for a chance to win: One Full-Conference Pass to VMworld 2014 in San Francisco* “Don’t FSCK with the Fish” T-Shirt Coho Data Chrome Industries Backpack *The prize includes the conference pass only. The winner will be responsible for their own hotel, airfare, and other expenses. Pass valued at $1,995 USD. Winner will be announced on August 1st via email, so register for a chance to win! A great deal especially if …

SDN Industry Analysis

June 23, 2014 by Bob Plankers

Tip of the hat to Ivan Pepelnjak over at ipSpace.net — a welcome three minute distraction this afternoon. Enjoy.

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