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Disaster Recovery has never been easier to manage than it is right now. Virtualization has given engineers a tremendous tool to allow us to almost effortlessly move workloads between datacenters. Now that we’re virtualizing workloads, we’re now capable of standing up exact copies of our servers in two offices and have them up and running in very short RTOs. In the past year we’ve seen two major storms hit the East Coast causing severe power outages as well as making commutes difficult or impossible for users to get to work. Thanks to the cloud we have many more mobile users than we used to and even if they’re not considered mobile, their servers may not be located in their office. Cloud presents some great options for disaster recovery that should be taken advantage of, no matter what your geographic location. If you’re in a SMB and you don’t have a DR plan, GET ONE NOW! ...

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment. What is a Slot? To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control. A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources. ...

I recently decided to give VMware Horizon a shot and found the install to be a little confusing so this gives me a good opportunity to lay it all out so that others can try it out for themselves. A big “thank you” goes out to Raj Jethnani for a helping hand with this post. If you’d like to follow him on twitter his link is here: @rajtech For those of you who don’t know, Horizon is a nifty SAAS platform for you to present thinapp applications too. I could see many organizations benefit from this technology in the near future. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) Configure the Horizon Service Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1) In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard. The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) In the last part we configured the Horizon Connector, now we’re going to run the setup wizard in order to assign applications and select users. Horizon Connector Setup Wizard Let’s begin the setup wizard Join the domain. Enter the domain name and enter the username and password that has permissions to add a machine to the domain. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) In the last part, we finished setting up the basics of Horizon Connector and the Service Portal. Now we can login to the Service Portal to assign our applications. Application Prerequisites A couple of more prerequisites should be done before we log in. First, install the Horizon agent on all (or a few test machines) clients that will be using the thinapp packages that are published with Horizon. ...

Many times I see new virtualization admins add too many vCPUs to virtual machines after they’ve converted their physical machines. I believe the reason for this is a simple misunderstanding that more is not always better in this case. With physical servers, the more is better approach seems to work fine. If you have a quad core processor it’s better than a dual core and if you have a dual processor server it’s better than a single socket. When it comes to virtual machines extra processors can actually make a VM perform worse than having too few processors. ...

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration! At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install. ...

I recently took the VCAP5 - DCD exam and wanted to share my experience for anyone who is preparing for this exam as well. Study In my opinion this is a fairly difficult exam to do any sort of preparation for. Most of my preparation was just every day design that I’ve acquired over the years. I think the biggest trick for a lot of administrators is to switch from a mode of thinking about things in a breakfix method, but rather as a holistic design methodology. I prefer to look at a design as a “pie in the sky” approach where I put all the best solutions I can come up with to meet a design requirement, and then start to modify those based on any constraints that might be known. ...

I used to love the fact that with my old Netapp FAS2040 that I’d get a phone call about replacing a failed drive almost before I received the alert about the drive in the first place. Phone home seemed genius to me and as it turns out, Hewlett Packard has this capability for their equipment. Full disclosure: As many of you know, I currently work for an HP Partner so my advice may be a bit biased. I can tell you that I wouldn’t put a product on this site which I didn’t like so please don’t think that I’m just trying to push HP products. You may see more HP related articles from me, only because I encounter them more frequently than others. ...