One of my visitors posed a question in another post of mine on how to upgrade the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESX 4.1 to U1. To prepare for this post, I downloaded ESXi 4.1 from VMware and installed it in VMware Workstation. I also have the 4.1 version of the vSphere client. And without further ado, here’s the process. [Read more…] about Upgrade VMware ESXi 4.1 (free) to U1
ESXi 4
VMware vSphere 4.1 U1 released February 10th
Big release today for the VMware vSphere 4.1 suite. Depending on the size of the environment you support, you’re either cheering at the small amount of work ahead of you, or sobbing because you just recently got everything updated to 4.1 ๐
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VMware: Odd issue with NFS datastores
I’ve noticed something odd with a number of clusters that I administer that have NFS datastores. One of the datastores will be duplicated, and end with (1). Typically, only one host has this duplicated datastore. At first I thought it happened because the datastore was mounted twice, once by IP address, and again by hostname/FQDN.
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VMware Host Profiles: compliance issue and fix
I thought I’d take a moment to write down some frustrations I’ve been having with VMware Host Profiles, and how I resolved it. Before I get into that, let’s take a second to discuss what they’re supposed to do, and how you can get it in your environment.
Host Profiles is a VMware vCenter feature that is available on hosts licensed with Enterprise Plus, and it allows you to take an ESX or ESXi’s configuration profile and apply it to other hosts. It’s a quick and easy way to replicate configurations for hosts in a cluster, and also to monitor a host’s compliance with the selected host profile.
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Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI
The other day I was looking at my virtual machines’ VMware Tools status, and sadly, many of them are out of date. It seems like I spend a lot of my time on host patching, but the Tools update seems to fall by the wayside. Perhaps it’s the disruption to production that rebooting causes (and the related change records and change management meetings), or maybe it’s the sheer number of VMs that I have to manage. I was curious what other folks’ infrastructure looked like, so I posed the question on Twitter: “#VMware admins, how good are you at keeping the Tools up to date?”
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