Plain Virtualization

With the release of vSphere 6, there were some changes to the certification as posted earlier. VMware announced the retirement of VCAP for vSphere Design and Administration and replaced it with VCIX which requires equivalent of both VCAP category exam with half the exam time . As announced recently, VMware Education has listen to feedbacks and instead of retiring VCAP certification all together it will still have it valid however VCIX will only been granted to individual with double VCAP for each track in Design and Administration except for VCIX-NV which will be the only direct VCIX certification with no option of VCAP. With this announcement, individual can now still be recognize in passing one of the category in each track and granted VCAP or VCIX for earning a double VCAP in any track. The upgrade path for existing VCAP does not change as announced earlier.  To achieve VCIX, existing VCAP with either category need just pass the other category in version 6. ...

With the release of vSphere 6.0 in Mar, the hardening guide is finally announced release today.  There is some different approach via vSphere API which is used in this release to help audit or implement using the guide. You can also bookmark this page for all the other version vSphere hardening guide.

Recently during an outage of my host during to hardware issue in my home lab where my vCenter 6.0 sit on it, resulted some strange behaviour on my View Connection Server 6.1.  I encounter the below error message: When I go to my Horizon View Dashboard, it looks fine. When I try to remove the vCenter entry under the Server options and adding it back I end up with another error when trying to add the View Composer. However this is not related to the strange behaviour above.  But rather this is due to my login did not contain a domain\username but instead of use just username . Back to the strange behaviour.  It seems my connection to my vCenter via Connection Server has a sudden slowness and the certificate seems to be corrupted.  I tried to find a solution to replace the self-signed (in my case) certificate on my View Connection Server however in vain.  I tried removing the vCenter and re-adding it back, that does not help. So I chanced upon some ...

NUMA is always a very interesting topic when in design and operation in virtualization space.  We need to understand it so we can size a proper VM more effectively and efficiently for application to perform at its optimum. To understand what is NUMA and how it works, a very good article to read will be from here .  Mathias has explained this in a very simple terms with good pictures that I do not have to reinvent.  How I wish I have this article back then. Starting from ESX 3.5, NUMA was made aware to ESX servers.  Allowing for memory locality via a NUMA node concept.  This helps address memory locality performance. In vSphere 4.1, wide-VM was introduce this was due to VM been allocating more vCPUs than the physical cores per CPU (larger than a NUMA node).  Check out Frank's post . In vSphere 5.0, vNUMA was introduced to improve the performance of the CPU scheduling having VM to be exposed to the physical NUMA architecture.  Understanding ho...

Previously I posted on my installation and upgrade of my vSphere 5.5 here .  Since each upgrade comes about a year or two that I perform, we ought to forget some important things.  So here is my experience. Before you start, head to the vSphere Upgrade Center .  Here you will find all the resources needed.  There is also a simple install walkthrough to guide you through with screenshots! 1) Read the documents on the requirements!  During the installation the vCenter requires at least 17GB of space to store the MSI and part of it the new Platform Service Controller (PSC) takes up 8GB install in the C:\ProgramData path.  Go through the requirements in the product documentation page . 2) Your DSN user in SQL for vCenter (vpxuser), needs to have additional rights for installation and upgrade but not during operations time. Grant this rights back.  In vCenter 6 installation, it points out the additional rights required.  This is great!  ...

Finally upgrade my home lab with vSphere 6.0 and Horizon 6.1.  Have to perform a demonstration to my customer how to assign Thinapp easily via the Horizon View Admin portal.  Guess what, luck never on my side and hit with lots of issues. This issue comes with lots of testing.  The error I encounter after assignment was HRESULT hr = 0×80070005. Access is denied .  Doing a few Google didn't bring me nowhere.  Assignment installation failed. Let me just walk through what I have done: Package a few Thinapp packages with editing of Package.ini mainly the MSI settings since I am doing a assignment from Horizon View Admin Portal.  Read more here . Place them in a file share with permission to VDI users (yes make sure the VDI users can access those folders) In Horizon View Admin portal, scan the repository for the Thinapp, make sure the .msi and .exe and .dat (if you are streaming and app is too big to build into .exe file) in the same folder in the reposi...

Following the announcement on 2nd Feb 2015 on the new vSphere 6 which is part of vSphere with Operations Management and vCloud Suite 6, today is the general availability (GA) for the binary. These includes but not limited to vSphere 6 (vCenter Server 6, ESXi 6), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 6, VMware Data Protection (VDP) 6, vSphere Replication (vR) 6, Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6, vRealize Automation (vRA) 6.2.1, vRealize Business (vRB) 6.1.0 and also not new in today release vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0.1. Head over to the vCloud Suite download site to get those bits. Also do check out the product documentation site on the changes from release notes. In conjuction, the release of Horizon 6.1 also announced and made available.  In this release, Horizon 6 Enterprise now includes App Volumes. Get the binary here and product document here .  Also refer to the vSphere Update Center for more information on upgrading. Need some help from co...

The start of February also mark the great launch today by VMware.  Another milestone achieve with more to look forward to which will change the way things will run in an infrastructure. Today has been the long awaiting launch of vSphere 6.0 (which many thought was during vSphere 5.5 but finally it made it), there are also some changes to some add-on products changes as well as bundle update. The General Availability (GA) for vSphere will be in Mar 2015.  The training courses are found here . What's New vCloud Suite will be updates with vSphere 6.0 and vCloud Director and vCloud Network & Security will be deprecated as announced last year and no longer seen in this bundle.  This also get updated with the new vRealize Operations (vROps) Suite to 6. vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) will be updated to 6.0 which include vSphere 6.0 and vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0.  Finally those on vSOM 5.5 have been asking for vROps 6.0 has been granted t...

If you are not aware, the vSphere Beta Program is not available to the public.  This is beta 2 where beta 1 was via invite or to VMware employees only. This is the first product from VMware where beta is free for sign up.  Do not miss this if you are a interested with the next release of vSphere. To sign up, head on here . By participating in the beta program, as always you need to be able to install this in some environment.  This can be your home lab or an isolated environment at your work place.  It can also be nested however if any issues resulted from nested will limit the support you reeive. So help sign up in this beta program and provide all your feedback and issues you encounter so that vSphere can remains as resilient, reliable and stable.  VMware will need any inputs possible to better this release so do not hesitate to provide. You will find all the documents and guides from the landing page upon signing up completion.