Sidney Smith

I just stumbled upon a fresh post by Hal Rosenberg, a Performance Engineer from VMware. Its a great doc, titled Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4. It has some great flowcharts and steps to take to come to a root cause analysis for performance issues. Although it is... (more)

While attending VMworld this year, I participated in Greg Lato’s VMworld 2009 Portrait Project. Greg works days for VMware and freelances as a photographer. I can barely maintain one blog, Greg has two. Latoga Labs chronicles his vocation and Latoga Photography chronicles his art... (more)

First off, I want to say that this is my first time in San Fransisco. It seems to be a great city, but I don’t have time to do any site-seeing. The Moscone Center, although small compared to the Las Vegas venues, seems to be able to accommodate all of the sessions. Somehow, the [... (more)

Monday was my first day at VMworld. I didn’t attend any sessions, but I did defend a design for my VCDX and I took the VCP4 Certification test. After that, I tried to attend the View Advanced Config and Troubleshooting Lab, but the line was huge, even for registered users. The on... (more)

Well, VMworld 2009 is almost upon us! I have an ungodly schedule for next week. I start the S&M with a nice refreshing VCDX Design Defense bright and early Monday morning at the VMware San Fransisco office. Then, its off to the SF Mariott for a relaxing sit by the VCP 4.0 Exam en... (more)

Two words: Holy Crap! http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/08/an-awesome-peek-behind-the-scenes-of-getting-hardware-ready-for-vmworld-2009.html Bookmark It Hide Sites $$('div.d1560').each( function(e) { e.visualEffect('slide_up',{duration:0.5}) }); ... (more)

I just finished reading Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - UCS (Unified Computing System) from Cisco. It gave an excellent take on Cisco’s view of how UCS benefits a datacenter. It also explains how new technologies from Intel, QLogic and Emulex all complem... (more)

Last week my boss came to me and asked if I could write a script for a customer to register VM’s after being replicated from once VI environment to another.  I agreed to take on the project and go for it. Like everything I do these days I decided to use powershell to write the sc... (more)

A whitpaper was posted in the VMTN communities Thursday outlining the differences between the ESX 3.x and ESX 4.x service console. It further offers resources for transitioning COS based apps and scripts to ESXi via the vSphere Management Assistant and the vSphere CLI. Also menti... (more)

If you know Steve Chambers you know he just moved to Cisco. Before that, he was with VMware and has been a pillar of the VI:OPS boards. He is now working on a document about Unified Event Management and in the spirit of community, he is looking for comments, suggestion, etc. He c... (more)

As many of you know, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the (soon to be released) second release of Microsoft’s free hypervisor.  This is the version of Windows Server 2008 that is a free download – no license needed.  It’s locked into a Server Core installation, capable of only running t... (more)

VMware just set up some discounted certification exams at VMworld. It just gives you another reason to go! Hi all, VMware will be providing onsite exam services at this year’s VMworld. The exams available are the VCP on VI3, VCP on vSphere 4 and the VCDX Enteprise Administration ... (more)

Just like they did with the Advanced Technical Design Guide for VI2, Scott, Mike and Ron are releasing the VI3 ATDG today. I read it when it was first released and it is a great reference. Go get some -> http://www.vmguru.com/ Bookmark It Hide Sites $$('div.d1494').each( function... (more)

Everyone at this point should be aware that the Service Console is now located in a vmdk on a VMFS partition.  The Service Console vmdk must be stored on a vmfs datastore and the datastore must either be local stoage or SAN storage that is only presented to the one host.  So I gu... (more)

In a previous article, I compared syslog servers and decided to use Splunk. Splunk is easy to set up as a generic Syslog server, but it can be a pain in the ass getting the winders machines to send to it. There is a home brewed java based app on the Splunk repository of user [...... (more)

OK… I know the wonks at VMware will frown upon this one, but someone posted a similar hack for WS 6.5 beta, so here it is for WS 7.0 beta. I finally got around to installing the beta code this morning and immediately saw a performance issue. VMware Workstation Beta runs in debug ... (more)

One of my pet peeves is that each virtual appliance coming out of VMware is that each different virtual appliance released by them is based on a different OS. Some of these do not even have documented methods for updating the OS. We all know that no matter what OS is running on a... (more)

Many of you have been invited to the public preview of VMware Workstation 7. If you haven’t taken the oppurtonity or haven’t been invited here is some of the main improvements that are included. VMware has changed the way the VMware tools are delivered. When you launch Workstatio... (more)

Just thought I would share these diagrams that I used in a recent training session. I used them to explain the differences in the storage protocols that may be used for a vStorage Cloud and how FCoE works. Click on the images for a larger view. The first image shows the differenc... (more)

After finally setting up a SLES 10 server on Hyper-V I thought I write a little how to on getting the Linux Integration components working. Microsoft includes an install doc that doesn’t really tell the whole story. I had already installed SLES before I read the manual and found out... (more)