vmware

I've just spent a few days working with a client of ours to implement VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We had a number of issues along the way - mostly due to the way in which they are using a mixture of NFS and iSCSI datastores. It was when we threw RDMs (via iSCSI) into the mixture that the problem I'm describing came about. When we talked to VMware support, we discovered that it is a known bug likely to be fixed in Update 3 of SRM (due Q4 2011?). Luckily there is a work around.

This article aims to answer a question that I couldn't easily find in the View installation manual, namely which firewall ports do you need to open to get a security server working from a DMZ? It's a simple question, but the View manual doesn't provide a simple answer. I created a demo setup and then checked my firewall logs to find out for sure. The results are below.

I've been looking at monitoring temperatures in and outside my house using a USB based thermometer solution. I found the PCTEMPer devices and bought a few to play with. There are no current Mac OS X drivers that I can get to work with Snow Leopard, so I figured I'd run a VM (FreeBSD) and share the PCTEMPer devices with that. It's not as simple as you'd think because Fusion only allows you to share a small number of devices with the VM. But there is an easy fix to the problem as you'll read below.

I often talk to people who don't understand what VMware snapshots are for and how they work. Common bad practices include using them as a backup technique, or applying them for the long term when applying patches. I hope that the following article might be useful to explain how snapshots work in vSphere. Part 1 of this article deliberately avoids showing you how the vSphere GUI works. I'll talk about the hows and whys in this part and show you how to apply this sensibly to a real VM in part 2.

It seems that VMware became aware that just about everyone has been logging into their ESXi boxes and enabling SSH access. So for the 4.1 release of ESXi, it is easy to enable the feature from within the vSphere client. Here's how.

This will be a quick post. I was searching for a way of implementing linked clones in Fusion, when I happened upon this posting. The crux of the post was "Does anybody know if something easier has been found for cloning VMW *Fusion*?"

I've got a pile of work to do with RSA coming up over the next six weeks. I'll be pretty much living and breathing the product in a project that will probably take me to Berlin, New York and London. It's an upgrade project so I thought I'd set up a sample environment and work through the process (yet again) as a bit of a practice. Any regular readers would know that I have fought with RSA 7.1 before. And I'm fighting it again today.

I signed an NDA, so I'm not telling you what's in the VCP 4 exam. Here are some quick hints though: read the blueprint. It's a great guide to the content of the exam (funnily enough!). And get this document bundle - most of the questions can be answered by knowing this documentation intimately.

The OVF Tool is included as part of the 'Full' sized Fusion 3.1 installer. I've recently written a brief article on how to make sure that it is installed for you when you first install Fusion. This article shows how to convert a virtual machine into an OVF template using this command line tool.

I have a template virtual machine created in Fusion that I'd like to share with a colleague. If this was an ESX virtual machine, I'd probably export it as an OVF file. In Fusion, it has been a tricky thing to do. Until now. Version 3.1 includes the OVF Tool if you know now to install it.