vsphere

Thoughts on the VMTN Subscription Idea

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Mike Laverick has started something of a campaign to bring back the VMTN Subscription, which was something like the Microsoft TechNet or MSDN models. I’m a TechNet subscriber and for $349 I get access to most everything Microsoft has. For testing purposes this is great. I don’t have to spend a lot of time dealing with activation timeouts, I can just test things and leave the my own test environment up and running for when I want to test new VMware Tools, or whatever. I think that’s fair, since I buy real Windows licenses for every other VM that I have (dev, test, QA, production, etc.). Right now, if you want a test environment your options are to pay for …

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How to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for VMware vCenter 5

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My venerable post on installing MS SQL Server 2008 for vCenter 4 was getting old, so I thought I’d update it, if only because I have a new admin helping me and I’m going to stick him with doing a bunch of installs. Ha! I thank the VMware folks who have incorporated a lot of the tweaks from my original document into the defaults for vCenter 5. They were probably obvious, and not taken from my work, but it’s content I don’t need anymore. Awesome. While I don’t mean this page to become a general support site for vCenter SQL Server installations please leave a comment if something needs to be clarified or corrected, or if I’m doing something dumb …

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8 Things I Really Like About VMware Workstation 8

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I’ve been using VMware Workstation 8 for a few days now. I really like it. A lot of posts have been made hitting some of the major highlights, but there are hundreds of small improvements that add up to be a big deal for me. Here are eight. 1. You can connect to a vSphere setup, and upload your VMs into the server environment. I’ve already used it to set up a new VM template locally, then upload it to my production environment. As I get more into vCloud Director I anticipate using this heavily to set up templates for new (or old) OSes. It’ll also be a great solution for dealing with virtual appliances that make assumptions, like DHCP. …

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How to Change SCSI Controllers on your Linux VM

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A question from Matt Vogt prompted this, where he wants to go from the BusLogic  SCSI controller to the LSI Logic SAS controller. It’s actually a straightforward conversion if you have the right steps. This is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5, but the principle should be the same for everything. It’s basically: snapshot, change config files, change hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in contrast, appears to have all the LSI Logic, parallel & SAS, drivers, as well as the paravirtual SCSI drivers, so all you need to do is shut the VM down and change the type of SCSI controller you’re using. I always recommend trying this on a test VM before you try …

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