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Reading Time: < 1 minuteIf you have a new NIC card or a server of a new generation could be possible that the right driver is missing in the standard ESXi installation ISO. And without a working networking is not possible install the ESXi (the installation will stop because one requirement is at least a supported NIC). Maybe the hardware vendor has a customized version of the ISO, but IMHO I don’t like this option (in some cases it could give some issues).
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFinally VMware vSphere 5.1 is available (after the product announce during the VMworld). Note that now there is also a virtual appliance also for Orchestrator (when one for VUM?). Also vShield is now called VMware vCloud Networking and Security. VMware ESXi 5.1 build: 799733 VMware vCenter Center 5.1 build: 799735 What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1? VMware vSphere 5.1 download page VMware vSphere 5.1 documentation VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 documentation Note that also those other products are now available: VMware vCloud Director 5.1 VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1
Reading Time: 4 minutesAnother interesting feature in vSphere 5.1 is the vSphere Replication (VR) technology. This feature was first introduced on 2011 with Site Recovery Manager 5.0 (on vSphere 5.0) to protect virtual machines natively by copying their disk files to another location where they are ready to be recovered, using a VM replication technology (storage vendor independent) instead of the storage replication (storage vendor depend). It provides simple and cost-efficient replication of applications to a failover site. The big change is that now it is a component delivered simple with vSphere editions (starting from Essentials Plus), and […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesWith the new vSphere 5.1 a new vMotion option has been added (only in the new Web Client) that combine vMotion and Storage vMotion in a singe hot migration step to migrate between hosts/clusters without shared storage! This could increase the mobility of the VMs and usage also of local storage (for some cases). Both VM state and VM files are transported across network using the vMotion vmkernel interfaces (so a good network design could be necessary). The requirements are: Hosts must be managed by same vCenter Server Hosts must be part of same Datacenter […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesFor people that need to make practice for the VCAP-DCA exam (and the beta of VCAP5-DCA will start soon) a good lab environment is mandatory. But it could also be useful for other reasons, like demo environment. There are several options to build one, but most used solutions are using nested hosts on one physical system with: VMware Workstation/Fusion over a host OS: common for a notebook. ESXi 5 on a server or a whitebox: common if you plan to have a always-on or fixed solution. Actually both solution could be good, but Workstation could […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAs written in the previous posts, in the ESXi installation there are two copy of the system image located in two different partitions (see Partitions layout of system disk and More on partitions posts). The actual system image is located on the first 250 MB partition, formatted with plain old FAT16 filesystem, but using a special pseudo-filesystem on it (see VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images). The image itself, s.v00, is a 124 MB compressed file, which is decompressed on boot and contains the hypervisor operating system. Note that the […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn a previous post I’ve described the partitions used by a ESXi installation (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk). Partitions are formatted with a FAT16 filesystem, but the ESXi files are stored into the banks partitions with a specific system that consist in some compressed archives containing the required files or more archives (as also described in the yesterday’s post about the reset of the root password). More details on the filesystem used is on the first number of the VMware Technical Journal, in the paper: VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient […]
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