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The Microsoft Ignite event was a good opportunity to add more informations and also features at the upcoming new generation of Windows, including the next Windows Server (now officially called Windows Server 2016). Also a new Technical Preview is now available for the download (go on the TechNet page).

I’ve already talk about the main news in the previous post Some interesting new features of Windows Server Next. But with the Technical Preview 2 there are more features as described in this post: What’s new in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2.

Note that this list may be not complete yet… some features remain under NDA other may be removed. We have to wait the the RC of the the final product release.

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After an upgrade to VMware vSphere 5.5 on a Dell PowerEdge R710, I’ve got strange occasion issues, where the hosts got completly disconnected from vCenter (with the ESXi/ESX host’s status as Not Responding or Disconnected in vCenter Server) and there was no way to reconnect, also after restarting the management services.

Locking in the ESXi console those kind of errors where notable: Bootbank cannot be found at path ‘/bootbank’.

The only temporally solution was power-off the VMs and restart the host. But the issue can randomly came back.

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In previous posts (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk and ESXi – More on partitions) I’ve described how are handles the partitions table on the destination installation media of ESXi 5.x (both in the case of a hard disk or a SD/USB disk).

With the new ESXi 6.0 the partition tables is similar in the case of a 1 or 2 GB destination device (like a previous SD media), but has some changes in the case of larger devices.

Core partitions remain the same with standard size: continue reading…

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Some days ago I was invited to as a delegate at the first edition of Data Field Day (#DFD1) event, scheduled in May 13–15, 2015 in California (Silicon Valley and San Francisco).

Data Field Day event purpose was to cover different topics from others Technical Field Day events: from big data to analytics to hyperscale architecture and cloud security, and all waves of innovations that are transforming the IT. A new format for some growing trends, including micro-services, mobile and the Internet-connected world.

But if you have seens some of the presentation video you may have some doubts if it was more a data (at high level) related event or a storage event (for some aspects it was also a Storage Field Day extra #SFDx).

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VMware EVO:RAIL represent the first Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offerings from VMware, announced in VMworld 2014 and available from the second half of 2014, and based (on the software part) on vSphere 5.5 and VSAN 1.0.

Now there is a new software release of VMware EVO:RAIL which includes also support for the VMware EVO:RAIL vSphere Loyalty Program.

One of the most notable improvements is that the scale of the hyper-converged infrastructure appliances are now doubled: from beyond the initial four appliances in a cluster and 16 nodes overall to eight appliances in a cluster and 32 nodes overall. Appliances running the updated EVO:RAIL software will now support approximately 800 general purpose virtual machines or 2,000 virtual desktop virtual machines per cluster.

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Due to the changes in the new vCenter Server 6.0 architecture, the SSO has now been incorporated in the new VMware Platform Services Controller “role”.

But the concepts of a global SSO accounts still exist and remain important to manage the infrastructure (and more important during installation and upgrade). If you forget the SSO admin password you can have some trouble. I’ve already wrote on how reset the VMware SSO password in the vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 versions and the procedure remain almost the same also in the 6.0 version.

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In previous post we have already see how add custom drivers to an ESXi installation ISO and how use ImageBuilder to make custom ESXi ISO, but in other cases you may need to define some custom settings during the installation or add custom vib files.

Booting from CD is not the only way, but custom ISO could be used also for boot from USB or for boot from virtual devices (like the iDRAC or ILOE).

In case you need to build custom ISO with custom option this post could help you: How to Create Bootable ESXi 5 ISO & Specifying Kernel Boot Options. If you need to build an ISO with custom driver the fastest (but unsupported) way remain ESXi-Customizer. The supported way is ImageBuilder.

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