I recently took a look at one of the larger VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments I work with, and noticed that I had high number of powered-off VMs. Approximately 35 percent of the environment's nearly 800 VMs were powered off. This is a practice of mine in my home labs, but I was shocked to see how somewhat sloppy I've become with powered-off VMs outside of that setting.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 05/12/20150 comments
I've been following the vSphere 6.0 release process for what seems like forever, but I still need to make sure I understand a few of the key concepts before upgrading my lab environments. In particular, I need a better grasp of a few of the new storage concepts. It's pretty clear there are key changes to storage as we know it, and storage policy-based profile management (SPBM) is what I'll look at in this post.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 04/28/20150 comments
I've been using Data Domain deduplicating storage systems as part of my datacenter and availability strategy. Like any modern storage system, there are a lot of features available, and it's a very capable and purpose-built system. In the course of using Data Domain systems over the years, I've learned a number of tips, tricks and ways to obtain information through the command line, and wanted to share them. Personally, I prefer user interfaces or administrative Web interfaces, but sometimes real-time data is best retrieved through a command line.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 04/17/20150 comments
As I last wrote, I'm preparing to make some changes in my home lab. I want to thank each of you who shared your advice on home labs -- and for the lively Twitter debate, as well. I think it's a good idea to share some lab tips for ease of use and ensuring you don't get into trouble. So in this post, I'll share a handful of home lab tips I've learned over the years.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 03/30/20150 comments
For IT pros, I think that the home lab has been one of the most critical tools to allow us to further our professional careers, prepare for certifications and go into the workplace with confidence. Further, if you're like me, the home lab does part of the household IT services. My most popular personal blog post is my rough overview of my home lab from January 2010. It is indeed rough, as I (shudder) diagrammed my home lab at the time with a permanent marker.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 03/18/20150 comments
CoreOS is a lightweight Linux OS that supports running containers. While I'm no application developer, I do think that infrastructure professionals need to get CoreOS in their lab now. Make sure you know how to deploy this new OS, configure it and make it available in the datacenter. VMware says that it's committed to making CoreOS fit in nicely with other workloads; what the blog post doesn't say is that it's a pain to deploy.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 03/05/20150 comments
Too many times when a new major Microsoft OS is released, other features or even separate products may overshadow some of the things that really make me excited. Windows 10 Technical Preview (the next client OS after Windows 8.1) and the Windows Server Technical Preview are hot topics right now. There's also a System Center Technical Preview. That's a lot of software to preview! Also in the mix is Hyper-V Server and the corresponding server role.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 02/17/20150 comments
I was recently deploying a virtual appliance, and found that a very specific BIOS setting on CPU power management was causing consistency issues in my vSphere cluster. Specifically, if I used one host for this virtual appliance, it worked fine. But the moment the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) would assign the virtual appliance to another host, it wouldn't power on. This virtual appliance was requiring specific CPU settings in the host BIOS. After the issue was resolved, I decided to investigate further.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 01/30/20150 comments
Many admins are either implementing or considering the VMware Virtual SAN, to dive more fully into the software-defined storage space. After having spent time there myself, I wanted to share a tip. You know that it's important to check out the VMware Compatibility Guide when shopping for components. But just as important as compatibility is performance.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 01/12/20150 comments
The message from vSphere Client when I try to perform a task that can't be done in the Windows Client is a quick reminder of a few things. First of all, I need to use the vSphere Web Client more. Second, I need to know, going in, which tasks can be done in which administrative interface for day-to-day work. The message I'm referring to is shown in Figure 1.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 12/19/20140 comments
vSphere 5.1 raised the maximum virtual machine (VM) size to 62TB. There is a catch, however: hardware version 10, along with the vSphere Web Client, must be used. That's OK, because I'm convinced the benefits outweigh any issues with day-to-day administration. I believe the 62TB Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) is the best way to avoid any bad habits that may have been developed over the years for VMs that needed more than 2TB of space.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 12/10/20140 comments
Early in my virtualization career, VMware vCenter Converter was one of the first tools that helped me get started with building a virtualized data center. Converter is a physical-to-virtual (P2V) tool that converts physical servers to virtual machines for us in vSphere environments. My days of using Converter on a daily basis are over, but I still do use it.
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Posted by Rick Vanover on 12/03/20140 comments