VMware

The cycles of VMware communities forums: Search is your friend

Being a long-time user of the VMware Communities forums, I can definitely see that the questions posted in the forums tend to cycle and repeat themselves by newer users. This week the topics focus on Active Directory and clustering. Other weeks it is performance, VCB or configuration...

VMware vSphere licensing commentary and FUD

VMware's new approach to licensing has brought on quite a bit of commentary in the virtualization community. People are discussing it on Twitter, in other blogs and over the phone. It's being discussed in podcasts and whenever virtualization administrators get together. There are several talking...

Pointers for using thin-provisioned disks

Thin-provisioned disks, or thin disks, have been getting a lot of exposure as a new feature in vSphere, but they can already be used in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). If not properly managed, however, you can overcommit disk space to the point where you can run out of Virtual Machine File System...

Using an iPhone to fix an ESX server while on vacation

As you may or may not know, I was recently on a 'sort of' vacation in Austin, TX., meaning I was still working on my latest book, VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX...

New vCenter Server features in vSphere

Although vSphere's vCenter Server offers many useful new features, there are three small ones in particular that were sorely needed in VMware Infrastructure 3 that I'm glad to see in this release. The first deals with the problem of too much data in the vCenter Server database. The majority of...

Licensing details from the vSphere launch event

Yesterday's much-anticipated vSphere launch  went off without any technical difficulties, and was exactly what VMware needed to do to build hype and excitement for vSphere. Many. however, were disappointed to find out that vSphere was not actually released, but it's not far off. It is officially...

VMware vSphere may require a hardware upgrade

One of the things VMware's products allow administrators to do is space out hardware upgrades, but that will soon change with the release of VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere's hypervisor uses a 64-bit kernel. What this means is that vSphere ESX 4 is a 64-bit operating system that requires 64-bit...

Must-have VMware infrastructure plug-ins

There are quite a few VMware plug-ins out there, but which would you really use on a regular basis? Here is a simple guide to the plug-ins I use and why I would not use some of the others. Must haves:

• VMware Update Manager (part of VMware vCenter Server)

VMware vSphere is coming

We're just one week away from VMware's big announcement of vSphere, its next generation data center virtualization product. There is much excitement and anticipation of this new release as it is has been almost 3 years since VMware Infrastructure 3 was released. There are many new features in this...

VMware Tools FAQ

Installing VMware Tools is generally required so that virtual machines (VMs) can fully participate in the VMware memory overcommit features by providing the per-VM memory balloon driver. This driver provides a mechanism for the VM to contract and expand memory (within the preset settings of the VM)...