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Tag: vcenter

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Mike Preston
  • Mike Preston
  • October 26, 2017

vSphere Upgrade Options

When it comes time for your vSphere upgrade there are many different approaches to how you perform the upgrades on your ESXi hosts.   An administrator who looks after a small cluster may update one way, whereas an administrator who looks after an enterprise with 1000s of hosts may opt to go another.  Also, depending on how your environment is deployed you might want to choose one method over another.  Factors such as a whether or not your hosts are managed by a vCenter server, whether or not they are members of a cluster – these things all impact the methods in which you chose to update to the latest version of ESXi.  Certainly, some methods are much more simplistic than others to perform, some offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error – let’s take a look at each method of upgrading our hosts below and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each…
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • October 25, 2017

Best Freeware for VMware vSphere – RVTools

One of the best freeware applications which gather a lot of information about VMware vSphere id definitely RVTools utility. Today we’ll have a look at some features which are the most useful ones for IT admins. RVTools is a Windows .NET 4.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. So, before you download and install the tool, you’ll need to check if your Windows system has at least .NET 4.0 installed.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • September 6, 2017

Convert a Physical Linux Server to a VMware VM

When you implement a virtual infrastructure, you may want to convert your physical servers to virtual ones to improve your datacenter consolidation. In this topic, we will see how to convert a physical Linux server to a VMware VM. To make this conversion, I used VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. To host VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, you need a physical or virtual machine based on Windows Server. Usually, when I run this tool, I use a virtual machine. Then, I run the executable to process the product installation.
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Dmytro Malynka
  • Dmytro Malynka
  • August 23, 2017

Top 5 Best Utilities for your vSphere infrastructure presented on VMware Labs in 2017

As all of you know, VMware Labs posts handful utilities for VMware administrators to make the management of vSphere virtualization infrastructure easier. Those tools are being developed by VMware Engineers, Community, and Open Source. Today I would like to emphasize some of the latest tools available to download and implement.
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • August 1, 2017

How to join VMware vCenter server appliance (VCSA) 6.5 to the Microsoft Active Directory (AD) Domain

VMware Photon OS has been the latest OS used for vCenter Server Appliance 6.5. This is the latest move from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as VMware wants to own the Operating system (OS) and manage its development cycles and patches releases. Things that aren’t possible on Windows OS or SLES. That’s why VMware used Photon Linux and continues to develop Photon OS which is optimized for VMware platforms.
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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • July 3, 2017

Setting statistics collection levels for the VMware vCenter Server and estimating the size of its database

Very often, VMware vSphere administrators have to find the reasons of performance issues by analyzing the historical data of various metrics on the VMware vCenter Server. However, sometimes the default set of metrics is not enough if you view performance data for the previous night or the end of the past week – in this case, you need to change the level of collected metrics and, possibly, the frequency of their collection and retention. In the VMware vCenter Server settings, you can set the data collection levels, different collection intervals and the time period that the data will be stored on the Server. In addition, you can set an approximate size of the virtual infrastructure in the host servers and virtual machines, which will allow to roughly estimate the size of the vCenter database. Let’s take a closer look at these settings.
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Dmytro Malynka
  • Dmytro Malynka
  • June 16, 2017

StarWind VVols for VMware vSphere Environment

VMDK file to LUN storage architecture has been the most usable scenario for years until VMware released Virtual Volumes in vSphere 6.0. In the case of an array with block access, own VMware file system – VMFS  – was used -, and NFS was used for file storage. The array capacity was divided into LUNs or NFS-shares and presented ESXi hosts in the datastore form. Frequently, datastore is a large capacity storage housing numerous VMs. In fact, allocating a separate datastore for each VM is quite inconvenient and time-consuming in terms of administration.
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • June 15, 2017

VMware vCenter Server Appliance Homelab tips

Many IT administrators or virtualization guys run their homelabs at home. It is a good way to learn new technologies, be able to break things in a lab to get stronger skills. It is sometimes a challenge, to squeeze as much RAM as possible from it. The main challenge is always a memory utilization. VMware VMs are getting memory hungry all the time and they are not “optimized” for Homelab use, but rather for production environments. Yes, it is the main purpose of those VMs after all.
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Alex Bykovskyi
  • Alex Bykovskyi
  • May 5, 2017

StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance Linux edition

This article describes the new StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, which was released on 26th of April. StarWind has always been a Windows native solution. However, due to market trends and the huge interest of our customers, we have decided to work in Linux direction. The main goal of the article is to show what StarWind VSA can do for clients and how you can work with it.
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