An interesting topic came up the other day between some of us in the cloud team, regarding whether Ephemeral Ports should be continued to be used with vCD deployments. A colleague of mine Aidan Dalgleish (Senior Consultant, VMware TS Cloud Practice) kindly documented our discussions and wrote up the decisions. He can be found on LinkedIn. Background The topic of Portgroup binding was discussed and Ephemeral binding was selected as the preferred option for vCD created Portgroups for some of the following reasons: * Due to the dynamic nature of vCloud Director it is often difficult to define how many devices will be connected to a given Portgroup * Easy to code as there is no requirement to monitor and dynamically adjust the number of ports configured on the Portgroup as with Static/Dynamic * Very flexible due to their being no requirement to define a number of ports and hence […]
Tag Archives | 4.1
VMware HCL version support
Last week a customer asked the question why the VMware HCL listed products that are certified with one version update but not the other. For example, the HCL shows HP BL620c G7 lists on ESXi4U2 but NOT ESXi4U1. The HCL Small Print: The detailed lists show actual vendor devices that are either physically tested or are similar to the devices tested by VMware or VMware partners. VMware provides support only for the devices that are listed in this document. What this translates to in the real world is that often the HCL exposes the time aspect of updating compatibility. If the server was released after a version of vSphere then it will not be listed for the previous versions, even though it may perform correctly.
VCAP: Datacenter Design Exam Tips
After passing my VAP-DCD Exam this week, I thought it might be good to write some tips on what to expect. These are very high level, so as not to give away any in depth clues. The exam generally has a nice feel to it, with a mixture of multiple choice single answer and multiple answer questions, drag and drop questions and some diagram creation. One thing I would recommend is make sure you allow enough time to complete the diagrams. It is a long exam, but you will need all the time. Each diagram can take around 30 minutes depending on its scenario. Diagram creation – You need to understand the principals behind how to create diagrams. These are all part of every day design documents, and is critical you are able to create these on the fly. Consolidation Ratios – You need to be able to understand consolidation […]
PEX 2011 Photos Part 2
A few more photos from PEX including a few from the evening party. The room where my second session ran
VMware Heartbeat 6.3 Update 1 released
VMware have announced the latest release of VMware Heartbeat, which is the product that can be used to provide resiliency to your vCenter environments. For the full release notes click here The update can be downloaded by clicking here This is a brief list of some of the new features * Enhanced passive server management capabilities — A new deployment option allows the passive server to be managed directly and monitored or patched remotely from a centralized solution; this includes receiving file level antivirus updates. This option is only available for: o vCenter 4.0 U1 and its updates, 4.1 and its updates o Remote SQL Server 2005, 2008 only * Secure Client Server Communications — vCenter Server Heartbeat now provides secure client server communications with SSL Encryption using a 2048-bit key. * Support for View Composer — This release of VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat now provides support for View Composer […]