Recently I was configuring a customer’s IaaS VMware Cloud and one of the first things I noticed were some inconsistencies in the Port Group configuration across the 6 ESXi Hosts in the cluster. This is easy to see in vCenter, from the Networks view of Inventory and the Networks tab, simply compare the names of
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I have created several new Virtual Appliances from common Linux flavors and packaged them in OVA format for you use and enjoyment: Linux Mint Fedora Workstation Kali Linux During the build, I like to practice KISS with a view on real world use. For example, I have installed and configured the basic packages and utilities
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As an IT or Infrastructure Director you are faced with tough choices all the time. Right now, that choice is: Do I keep on-premises Compute Infrastructure or move services to The Cloud? Unfortunately, many IT departments have a long history of problems, ranging from availability to security. Moreover, costs always seem to be on the
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I spent all morning chasing an annoying error in Group Policy Management while trying to delete an old unused OU while logged in as Domain Admin: Group Policy Management Access is Denied I thought I would share the remarkably simple solution here, because I spent all morning following erroneous posts on various sites. Everyone seemed
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I have to confess that I have always thought of NFS for vSphere as being a second-tier choice. Even the best solutions from well known vendors using 10GbE and SSD, NFS datastores always seem to under-perform and be more problematic as compared to block-storage SAN devices. Even with the theoretical reduction of overhead per payload
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I’ve been harping about this for years, but a couple of recent customer situations have emphasized the importance of correct time/NTP configuration for all of your vSphere components. In one situation, incorrect time configuration almost completely broke a Nutanix Storage cluster! There was no problem with Nutanix or VMware, but rather networking challenges prevented the
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External “Trusted” CAs There is a common misconception that security is improved Through installing certificates issued by “trusted” CAs. The truth is that certificates issued by external CAs like Thawte, Verisign and GoDaddy are no more secure than those you create yourself! In fact, by going to an external source in the first place, and
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In an ideal world, management would provide unlimited funding to upgrade hardware continuously! We all know that’s not going to happen! Sometimes it is necessary to prolong the lifespan of servers as long as possible, particularly when they are extremely well-provisioned devices, even by today’s standards! Such is the case with our HP BL460 G7
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I was designing a customer vSAN deployment and I came across the guidelines and formula for calculating the required ESXi Coredump partition size: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147881 Right away, I started working the formula for my customers deployment, when it occurred to me; this is WAY more complicated than it needs to be! VMware actually wants you to take
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For years, I have dismissed Virtual Machine Hardware version as unimportant. In fact, in this very blog, I may have advocated for leaving VM Hardware Version set at 8, to maintain full compatibility with both the vSphere C# Client and the vSphere Web Client. Unfortunately, thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, things have changed. Updating your
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