9 Things You’ll Love About vSphere 6.0

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 …

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Can't Change Virtual Disk Formats When Targeting a Datastore Cluster

As I work more and more with vSphere 5 I am finding a few anomalies. One of them appears to be a bug where you cannot switch a VM’s disk format during a storage vMotion, when you target a datastore cluster. To be more precise, it looks like you should be able to, but it doesn’t end up happening. The workaround is to disable Storage DRS for that VM, target a datastore directly, then edit the Storage DRS settings afterwards to re-enable DRS for that VM. This is what it looks like when I try. I select “thin provision” from the virtual disk format, choose a datastore cluster (in this case it’s my “Tier 2” cluster), and click next:   …

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