I just received word that I have been accepted into the VMware Certified Design Expert Program. This is a new certification program from VMware that is designed to really separate itself from traditional certification paths.
I’m hoping to start studying for the VMware VCDX exam process so I did a little research on getting a home VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment setup.
I needed to modify the sysprep.inf file inside of virtual disk and I needed a utility that would allow me to just use a vanilla text editor on the file. Why not just power on the virtual machine you say? Well if I were to power it on then I would have to re-create my sysprep.inf from scratch because there would be no way to stop it from running once Windows started to boot.
Configuration of NTP is an often overlooked step in setting up a VMware ESX environment. It is important to keep accurate time not only on the guests but also on the hosts. In the 3.5 release of ESX you can configure NTP from the VI Client, but some older releases require configuration from the Service Console. Here are the steps involved in NTP configuration from the Service Console.
For the most part working with networking in a VMware Infrastructure environment can be easily done through the Virtual Infrastructure Client. However, sometimes the need arises to change the IP address of the Service Console. While you can go the route of creating a new Service Console port and removing the old one, I find it easier to change the IP details on the original Service Console port from the actual server console.
There are only a handful of companies that are currently producing a connection broker product. If you dig through the documentation from HP, IBM, and others they mention this “optional” magical box that serves as the bridge between the client devices and the hypervisors. Very few of these vendors who are pushing VDI have come forward and presented a solid connection broker component, which I would consider to be one of the most critical components of VDI. I have listed them here for convenience in evaluating end-to-end VDI solutions.
I used this to upgrade an ESX host from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2. It is likely that the same procedure can be used with future releases. Use caution when upgrading production servers as this procedure DOES take the host offline.
There are some new features on the horizon for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure in the latest releases of ESX 3.1 and VirtualCenter 2.1. Although we haven’t officially seen anything on these releases the buzz is that we can expect to see some if not all of the following.
VMware now officially supports running the VirtualCenter database on SQL Server 2005. As you may have expected there are a few caveats and a handful of configuration items you need to take into consideration. However, for the most part this is great news and will allow you to *finally* get rid of those SQL Server 2000 servers.
Running VirtualCenter in a virtual machine is fully supported by VMware to the same degree as if it were installed on a physical server. There are several reasons why deploying VirtualCenter in a virtual machine would be advantageous: