Whether or not you use any form of hybrid cloud, I think it's important to at least know what's available, and how it's being used. There are two primary uses: One is to extend the traditional datacenter to the cloud, including virtual machines (VMs), networking and storage. The other main use is in building cloud-native applications.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 05/06/20160 comments
It's standard operating procedure to check the VMware Compatibility Guide before doing anything significant, like purchasing equipment, upgrading a cluster, installing a new feature and so on. The compatibility guide is a great online research tool, and it's important to give it a look when it comes to ensuring proper support.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 04/18/20160 comments
As virtualized infrastructures get more complicated, sometimes you need a way to troubleshoot things quickly, in simple terms above the infrastructure. One of the areas I've looked closely at is network throughput. This is partly because I've worked in a lot of virtualized infrastructures that use more NFS, SMB3 or iSCSI communication for VMs, and less fibre channel, as I've gone along.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 03/24/20160 comments
In vSphere 5.1, the vSphere tag framework was introduced, and has been improved steadily since. It's an organizational construct at a management level above the infrastructure, and is great for a number of things. Let's start by my own definition for each of these two concepts and then I'll outline some good use cases.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 02/04/20160 comments
I find that the virtualization industry is very dynamic, yet I'm a bit guilty of having "tunnel vision" for the two most popular Type 1 hypervisors, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. But there are other good ones out there, and you should know about the options. To that end, here's a quick rundown on who's who for 2016 in the hypervisor market:
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 01/14/20160 comments
One of the things I love nowadays is doing little things that make a difference. That was the spirit of my recent post on 7 random tips for vSphere. I thought now it'd be a good time to do the same for Hyper-V. As before, this is a list of random tips to help make day-to-day Hyper-V tasks easier.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 11/20/20150 comments
I've been wanting to do a post like this for a while, and have finally gotten around to it. I've learned a few things over the years (it's true!), and some of the things we take for granted in our daily practice can be used to help others along the way. Here's a list of seven random tips that don't merit a separate blog post, but can help you today (and tomorrow) with your vSphere administration duties.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 10/16/20150 comments
Earlier this year, I wrote that I was going to start a next-generation home lab. Alas, I haven't made any significant progress on the topic. But I did have a power outage that made me realize that my older, power-hungry servers are wearing out my battery backup units quicker than they should be. This, and the fact that my wife was not so happy about how long it took me to bring the shared drive back online, has made me revisit the lab to both modernize and simplify the configuration.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 09/25/20150 comments
There are a lot of features you expect today from a hypervisor; and I'm glad to see that the Hyper-V role coming in Windows Server 2016 will support nested virtualization. This is a feature that's been around on other Type 1 hypervisors for a while, and for Hyper-V this is a bit overdue; still, happy and ready for it.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/30/20150 comments
There was a time when it was taboo to virtualize critical applications, but that time has long passed. I speak to many people who are 100 percent virtualized, or very near that mark, for their datacenter workloads. When I ask about those aspects not yet virtualized, one of the most common answers is "Active Directory".
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 07/01/20150 comments
VMware vSphere 6.0 has a ton of significant upgrades. I want to touch on one of those -- Linked Mode -- as it's come a long way in vSphere 6.0. I've also been using the vSphere Web Client exclusively now, so bear with me and I'll try not to be too grumpy.
Linked Mode serves an important purpose when there are multiple vCenter Servers, allowing you to view them in one "connection" simultaneously. Additionally, if you create any roles, permissions, licenses, tags or policies (excluding storage policies), they're replicated between the vCenter Server systems. The end result is your administrative view is complete and you can see all items quite easily. But with vSphere 6.0, getting there is a different story.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 05/27/20150 comments