Latest Entry
Jan 24, 2010 Blogs
I’ve been meaning to dig into something technical for a long time as a more than welcome change in daily routine. I’ve been on the hunt for a new house (in Utrecht), have been busy with the VMware Enterprise Solution Provider partnership and did a complete rebuild of my internal Lab Manager environment. Also, I’m beginning my preparations for the VCDX Design Exam (which I’m going to take at the end of February). A couple of months ago, I visited the subject of RDM’s from a different angle (link), but now I wanted to give a more complete report on the matter.
Read More..
Recent Entries
Jan 23, 2010 Blogs
Besides the two Labs I have at work, I’ve gotten myself a new laptop to use as a lab-inbetween-home-and-work-lab.
Hypervisor Lab @Work
Two Dell PowerEdge T605 (see my previous post)
Lab Manager @Work
We’re running Lab Manager on three Dell PowerEdge 1950’s (16GB RAM, dual core Xeon’s) and a Dell/EMC AX150i with 12×500 GB SATA. Nothing really fancy, but an adequate solutions for our training and testing purposes.
Mobile Lab @Bag
A brand new Dell Latitude E6500
- Intel Core 2 Duo P9700
- 8GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM (2x 4GB)
- 250GB SATA-II HDD 7200RPM
- 15.4″ Wide Screen WUXGA (1920×1200) 2CCFL
- Mobile Intel GMA X4500HD
- Intel WiFi Link 5100 (802.11 a/g/n 1X2) 1/2 MiniCard with Centrino label
- US/Int – Internal Qwerty LED Backlight Keyboard
- 6 Cell 54WHr LI-ION Primary Battery
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (x64, English)
- 8x DVD+/RW Drive
I’m planning to replace the DVD-drive with an caddy with an Intel 80GB SSD:
I will be replacing the HDD with the SSD, and placing the HDD in the modular bay. The SSD will run my OS, applications and VM’s, as well as an iSCSI Target (to connect vESX VM’s to shared storage). The HDD will be use to place music, pictures, movies and application installation media (like ESX ISO’s).
Dec 22, 2009 Blogs
I’ve upgraded my employer’s Lab Manager installation to 4.0.1 last thursday. I followed procedure by disallowing new deployments, undeploying all virtual machines, making sure nobody could login, double-decked that no event were currently running and make backups of the virtual machine and database files.
I commenced the upgrade, and clicked through the installer. The upgrade went smooth as far as I could see. After the upgrade, I went to the webpage of the LM-server to finish the upgrade wizard. Instead of the upgrade wizard, I was welcomed by the initialization wizard. It scared the hell out of me, this was not supposed to happen!
I assumed the installer did a boo-boo with the database, replacing it with a fresh one instead of upgrading the old one. I was right, in the installation directory of SQL I found the ‘old’ database in a *.renamed format. The new database files were smaller and had newer modified dates.
Read More..
Dec 11, 2009 Blogs
At the fifth Dutch VMUG Event, I’ve given a presentation on VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. I’ve uploaded the slidedeck of this (Dutch) presentation to SlideShare, a nifty way to share your presentations.
Read More..
Dec 11, 2009 Blogs
Follow the Dutch VMUG Event 2009 live on twitter using the #DutchVMUG tag. Enjoy this video of Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, congratulation all Dutchmen on the fifth Dutch VMUG Event:
Read More..
Dec 7, 2009 Blogs
You’ll know when you’ve come up with a good title when other people start copying it. Thanks Jason!
I’m setting up a VMware vSphere environment for a demo and presentation I’m giving later this week on VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 at the Dutch VMUG Event. I prepared a couple of VM’s on my laptop running VMware Workstation, among wich a vCenter Server installation. I installed two physical servers with ESX4, attached them to vCenter and configured a dvSwitch on both. As these hosts are really simple desktops with just a single NIC, I had to configure the dvUplinks group with one uplink per host. I migrated the Service Console Port (vswif0), created a couple of port groups for Virtual Machine networking and created a VMKernel port for NFS and VMotion. Since there was no need for the standard vSwitch anymore, I simply deleted the associated Port Groups and the vSwitch itself:
Read More..
Dec 2, 2009 Blogs
I’ve been experiencing a problem with a very small VMware ESXi 4 host on which I run two VM’s for VMware vCenter Lab Manager management (a vCenter VM and a LM VM). I was rebuilding the environment, so I had both VM’s running on this host with (at that time) 3GB of RAM. When adding this host to vCenter, I got weird and cryptic error messages:
Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Unknown installer error.
I Googled my ass off, but never found an explanation or workaround. Finally, I decided to move the VM’s to another host, put it in maintenance mode, reboot it, and tried to add it to vCenter once more. For some reason or another, this worked!
Read More..
Nov 13, 2009 Blogs
Zoals Arne, Bouke en Viktor, Ivo, Eric, Arnim, Duncan en Gerben al besproken hebben vindt op 11 december 2009 het jaarlijkse Dutch VMUG Event 2009 plaats! Dit jaar is het extra feest, want het evenement wordt voor de vijfde keer georganiseerd!
Het evenement staat dit jaar uiteraard in het teken van de release van vele versie 4 producten, allen onder de vSphere vlag. Zo gaat Eric Sloof een sessie verzorgen over het beheren van een vSphere 4 omgeving met behulp van de Virtualization EcoShell en Luc over PowerCLI, Verron over de integratie van NetApp systemen met de vStorage API, Viktor over de vNetwork Distributed vSwitches, ikzelf over vCenter Lab Manager 4, Willem over Citrix XenApp op vSphere en tenslotte Gabrie over de best practices bij het ontwerpen van een vSphere omgeving.
De volledige agenda is hier te bekijken, en de diverse sprekers hier. Naast deze parallelle sessies is er dit jaar ook ruimte voor een workshop over vCenter Hearbeat. Check ook de sponsors, die ook op de beursvloer aanwezig zullen zijn. Voor de locatie en andere praktische informatie ga je hierheen.
Zoals gezegd, ik zal zelf ook een sessie verzorgen. Ik ga jullie wegwijs maken in de wereld van VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. Lab Manager biedt de gebruiker de mogelijkheid om de interne test- en ontwikkelomgeving te automatiseren.
Net zoals de laatste paar jaar is er ruimte voor rond de 600 deelnemers. Zoals een concert van Foreigner is dit congres meestal snel helemaal volgeboekt. Schrijf je dus snel in op de site van de VMUG: http://www.vmug.nl/modules.php?name=Inschrijven
Nov 5, 2009 Blogs
I’ve created a small video on how to reproduce the hostsfile bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1:
Read More..
Nov 4, 2009 Blogs
While tinkering around with the new NetApp System Manager 1.0.1, I found something that could be considered a bug. I’m connecting the manager to a FAS2020 with the most recent ONTAP version (7.3.2), and needed to set up some (temporary) virtual IP’s and DNS-names. For this last item, I edited the filer’s hostfile using NetApp System Manager:
Read More..
