By Other

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Last week I busy speaking at the Brussels VMUG and I didn’t get home until about 9pm. So I didn’t have time to write up my round-up of VMwarEmployee blogs. I had a good turn up to my session on “The Software Defined Datacenter: A Personal View”, and you might notice (although its a bit dark) that Gabrie Van Zanten and Eric Sloof were in the front row! Anyway, it was great event attended by such luminaries as Ducan Epping, Frank Denneman, Alan Renouf, and Cormac Hogan.

Anyway, down to business. I originally started this weekly posting because I felt we in VMware could do more to cross-promote our works to each other audiences. I’d forgot at in away we already do that – Duncan has a weekly post summarizing the output of his team in the “Tech Marketing Update” post. It’s well worth checking it out as it is a quicker summary. As for me I’m going to carry on doing my own summary as I find it useful to go through what folks have been writing about in the week.

Duncan Epping:

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Duncan has written a couple of post this week. The first pointing out the fact the VMFS file sharing limits have increased from 8 to 32 (which brings VMFS in line with NFS from a scalability) perspective – the biggest impact will be felt by VMware View and VMware vCloud Director which both use the parent/child relationships implicit in “Linked Mode” and “Fast Provisioning”. What I didn’t know is whilst View doesn’t yet support the new scalability, vCD 5.1 does. Duncan also has a post clarifing where the various HA advanced settings are held. Turns out there are 3 types of settings (das, fdm, and vpxd). These are configured in different locations – there is a KB article on the question, but Duncan’s post summaries it nicely. Additionally, Duncan has an interesting (to me) post about resizing IDE drives (with Windows7). I’ve been caught out by this in the past – to degree that I now personally aviod using IDE disks where possible.

William Lam:

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First time appearance for William which is long overdue. He has a two-part post about gathering information from our “Virtual Infrastructure Navigator” appliance, and then exporting into a CMDB. I’ve not touch the VIN yet, but it is on my “to do” list once I’ve got myself through all this prep for the VCP-Cloud

Extracting Information from VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) Part 1

Extracting Information from VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) Part 2


 

Andre Leibovici:
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Andre has two interesting articles this week. The first is about changing the URL of vCenter within VMware View. The issue associated with the way the name is inputted into the View and the type of certificate used within vCenter. Basically, you can get eronious red exclamation marks because a hostname is used instead of an FQDN, or else a wildcard certificate has been used. Andre shows how by using adsiedit against the View database you can modify the vCenter entry without the need for removing and re-adding the vCenter. Andre also clarifies how licensing in View is audited when a customer signs an ELA for View. Of course, such ELAs do vary from customer to customer – basically its the number of concurrent desktops – that’s defined as the number of powered on desktop with active connections or checked out for offline mode.
Rawlinson Rivera:
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Rawlinson has a post that’s close to my heart as its focused on the technology stack I’m (re)learning – vCloud Director. As you might know vCD now supports vSphere’s “Storage Profiles” feature where you can classify your storage into different tiers of performance and availability. Unique to vCD is the storage profile of *(Any). It doesn’t appear in any other location except vCD. Personally, I don’t use it myself. Anyway, Rawlinson explains what this storage profile does, and lays out some important caveats about its usage.