vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide – Available in Europe

Quick Start GuideThe vSphere Quick Start Guide is doing well, I don’t think we will quite take the Christmas Number 1 best seller slot but still, thanks to anyone who has purchased the book so far and a bigger thanks if you have left us a review or published a blog post, its always good to hear how people are finding the book.

After the release I had a few questions about when it would be released on the UK Amazon site, it seams that apart from sharing their name, these two sites do not have anything to do with each other, one would assume that once it was published on the US site it would soon make its way over to the UK site, that doesn’t seam to be the case.

Do not despair, we have now released it via LULU, a self publication site, you can now purchase the book and have it delivered very quickly from here for just…

£12.53 – no I am not missing a 0, that is correct, what a bargain price !

Continue reading →

Local Plugin Creator

Recently VMware are adding everything into vCenter to be centrally managed, apart from my PowerCLI prompt I think the vSphere Client is the second most launched application on my computer !

Now wouldn’t it be useful if you could add your other management interfaces into the vCenter Client, even if the vendor hasn’t created a plugin…

One App to rule them all, One App to find them,
One App to bring them all and in the vSphere Client bind them.

Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Continue reading →

PowerCLI Quick Reference Guide

Way back in the days of the “Virtual Infrastructure Toolkit” I released a quick guide for people to keep on their desk or in their pocket, the idea was it would give you enough information about the VITK whilst still being on a single (double sided) page.

Well things have moved on and the days of the VITK are no more, now we have PowerCLI and aren’t we pleased !

So to keep us up to date and so that we still have a quick reference, I have updated the single sheet to include all the new cmdlets and I also threw in a few other resources too.

Please download, print off and fold, keep it with you to help with your day to day usage of  PowerCLI (or is that just me ?!?). Continue reading →

Exploring the PowerCLI cmdlets – Get-NicTeamingPolicy Part 2

In my previous post “Exploring the PowerCLI cmdlets – Get-NicTeamingpolicy” I showed you how to output some great looking information for vSwitches which detailed all the information we may ever need to know, so whilst on the same cmdlet lets look at PortGroups, these have the same type of settings and the same cmdlet also works against a PortGroup object, as before we can display this information with a single one liner… Continue reading →

Boot from Paravirtualized SCSI Adapter

From vSphere U1, VMware now support booting from a Paravirtualized SCSI adapter, why would you want to do this ?  Well why not, check out the VMware  Performance Blog where VMware have tested this adapter and shared their results.

VMware were able to achieve 350,000 I/O operations per second on a single vSphere host (ESX 4.0) and 3 virtual machines.  From their findings the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter was able to achieve 12% more throughput with 18% less CPU cost compared to the LSI virtual adapter… Now you see why we should use it !

So in trying to test this the first thing I did was move one of my current virtual machines onto the adapter by clicking “edit settings” go to “SCSI controller 0” and click the change type button, from there you can select “VMware Paravirtual”. Continue reading →

Exploring the PowerCLI cmdlets – Get-NicTeamingPolicy

One of the new cmdlets from PowerCLU 4.0 Update 1 is Get-NicTeamingPolicy, so what does this do ?

It retrieves the Nic teaming policies of the specified virtual switches and virtual port groups, obviously !

So how can we use this cmdlet ?

Well, as it details the teaming policies of either a virtual switch or a portgroup then we will need to give it a…virtual switch or a portgroup, so how do we do this, lets try a one-liner:

Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch | Get-NicTeamingPolicy

This will do as it says on the tin, get a list of the hosts, for each of these it will get a list of virtual switches attached to the hosts and then list their nic teaming policies, the output is as so:

Continue reading →

Jump Start Virtualization EcoShell

I have talked about the Virtualisation EcoShell (VESI) enough on this blog for people to know what its all about but how do you get started ?

One option is to join the FREE live meeting tomorrow (1/12/2009) at 17:00 GMT (11:00 am Central Standard Time)  presented by Scott Herold by registering or joining here.  Anyone who has seen Scott present before will know how great the presentation will be and you are bound to pick up some expert tips from the man himself. Continue reading →

vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide is here

image

Its here, I’m an author, watch out JK Rowling !

Its been a while coming but the vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide is now available to buy on Amazon (US), we are working at getting it on the UK site but I’m just pleased to see it out there and available to buy.

This book is a co-authored publication bought to you from some of the leading names in VMware bloggers and admins, and they also asked me to contribute too 🙂

The book is designed for you to carry around with you, its not a heavy duty full novel but more of a VMware admins help book which can be referred to when you are in the damp dark datacenter at 4am in the morning with no internet connection !

Having said that there is definitely something in there for everyone, whether you are new to VMware or a seasoned Pro.

Throughout the book you will find great tips, real life situations and numerous PowerCLI examples.

If you haven’t yet heard of this book then please read these wonderful comments already left on the Amazon post.

If you have read it then please, leave your comments along with the others.

Buy your copy now ! in fact buy two !

VMware Converter – VMXNET3 Issue

How do you move your VMs from one vCenter to another ?

Today whilst moving a few VMs from my test vCenter server to my Non Production vCenter server I hit upon an issue with VMware converter, this is just a warning so you do not have the same issue.

I used VMware Converter (Latest version at this time: 4.0.1 build-161434) to move the VMs, as I have a thousand times before, but the machines in question was actually a Hardware Version 7 VM with a VMXNET3 network adapter, moving from ESX4 U1 to ESX 4U1.  I have to say VMware Converter really is a great tool, I use it for many tasks from growing disks to P2Vs and the fact it is free is fantastic.

When going through the wizard Converter clearly found the VM as Hardware Version 7 as seen below… Continue reading →

PowerCLI to SQL Databases

One of the things I love about PowerShell is how versatile it is, its a wonderful framework which can slot pieces of a puzzle together to create a masterpiece, Now I know it exists I can see every day uses and needs for PowerShell, it fits into every nuck and cranny.

Take for example my SnapReminder script, the fact that you can pull VMware Information from your vCenter, then run the results by Active Directory and finally push it through an SMTP server to complete the final piece of the puzzle astounds me, the only limit to PowerShell is your imagination.

The other day I was watching Twitter when someone asked how to do a particular task, they wanted to pull information from the VMware Infrastructure and update some existing data in an  SQL database, I watched as multiple answers were given to this person…. do a database synchronisation…..buy this  third party tool…..you cant do that…..extract it as a csv, convert it to xml, import it into here, spin around three times and say alacasam !

My instant answer was of course PowerShell (that seams to be my instant answer for most things of late).  The reply was, can you access SQL with PowerShell then ?  YES

I don’t think I personally have come across anything you couldn’t do in PowerShell given enough time and resources !  Lets talk through this scenario.

Continue reading →