I think that any business needs a disaster recovery site. That’s why I discuss today VMware vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 8.1 and how to set up that solution.

An ability to back up and restore vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) configurations appeared back in vCSA 6.5. I guess that many have already used it. If you were unlucky to restore from that backup, you know that this procedure is not that straightforward. Bad news: In vCSA 6.7 Update 1 configuration restore process is still like that. In today’s article, I take a closer look at how you back up and restore VMware vCSA 6.7 configuration.

Building a virtualized environment with VMware Workstation is a bit different from the scenario discussed before. Today, I use VMware Workstation 15 Pro – a virtualization platform that supports hypervisor virtualization and allows administrating small VMware infrastructures. Yes, Workstation is a vCenter-like platform, but it has rather limited functionality. Anyway, it allows building a vSphere lab for free! This being said, the solution is good for this article.

While writing my previous article, I remembered the days when I was only building my first lab. It was a bit tough, you know, as vSphere yet was a black box for me. Those thoughts brought me to the idea of writing this article. The article in which I share my know-how of building a minimalistic lab using… only a PC, switch, and laptop. I’ve divided this topic into 2 parts as I am unsure whether you guys like long-reads. In this part, I discuss how to build an ESXi environment using PC and ESXi 6.7 U1. The next article addresses creating a lab using PC and VMware Workstation 15 Pro. I hope that both of them will be really handy for you!

Some time ago, VMware released VMware vSphere 6.7 U1. You know, I am really happy to, finally, find some time to take a thorough look at it. vSphere 6.7 U1 is the most up-to-date version of this virtualization platform so far, thus it is good to know its new features to predict what to expect of the upcoming versions. Well, I guess that this article is kinda of a long read. Honestly, I could not make it shorter as I wanted it to provide the entire picture of changes that were brought to vSphere 6.7 platform with U1. I hope you like it.

VMware Tools is a handy utility suite that makes your VMs run faster and dramatically simplifies their management on the whole. And, the nice thing is, it installs fairly easy on your VMware VMs regardless of their guest OS. Today, I’m going to talk about VMware Tools in general and how to install the package in different environments.

  Sometimes, you badly need to provide your VMware VMs with more RAM or vCPUs without shutting them down. True, there’s a trick allowing you to do that – CPU Hot-Plug and Memory Hot-Add. In this article, I’ll discuss both these features and how to use them in different environments. Why do I write an article about Hot-Plug and Hot-Add in 2018 even though they were introduced back in ESXi 4.0? You see, there are very few in-depth studies of how Hot-Add and Hot-Plug work in different environments for some reasons. Sure, you can find a bunch of good articles about how you enable those features, why you need them, and when you may just want to leave them disabled (yes, they are disabled by default). There were some studies held for Windows guest OS family, but there is very few known about how Hot-Add/Hot-Plug work in Linux. Well, I hope to fill that gap with this article.

If you are new to VMware or just starting out in the tech, you may feel a bit confused about products naming. Well, at least I was. There are tons of products in the suite so many have a hard time grasping how all those things come together. For instance, it may be hard for a beginner to tell apart ESXi and vSphere. What should you do? Well, nothing special, you know. Google. Ask fellow admins. Look through forums. Read books. Well, my post is not here to bring you from the very beginning to finish. It’s rather a long process, and you need to pay your dues sometimes. Honestly, I got some knowledge only through fixing things that I had messed up. This post covers some questions that popped out in my head when I was only starting. And, my case is not unique. So, let’s start with VMware!

Deduplication is a cool technique that some admins use when it comes to saving storage space. No wonder. By deduping, you can gain some extra storage even without deleting anything. Everyone seems to use it, but how does that thing, actually, work? In this article, I’ll look under dedupe hood to understand better its operating principles. Why one may need this? You see, you always can make the most of things once you understand how they work. I believe this principle to apply to almost everything! So, here’s why I examine such a common storage optimization technique as deduplication in this article. True, that’s up to you to dedupe or not. Today, I won’t discuss whether you need deduplication at all. Here’s a good article on this matter.