Varrow Blogs

Shouting it from the Rooftops while standing on my SoapBOX! Extra! Extra! – SoapBOX  Citrix XenApp Access Management Console & vSphere Client breaks after applying Microsoft .NET 2.0 updates.  Citrix I was working on installing a Citrix Server at a client site placing the server into its intended farm today using a fresh installation of [...]

Its no secret, vSphere 4.1 is finally among us living! Its been covered over and over and over again. Any how I will spare you the “What’s New” copy and paste, although the list is impressive. Here are the features that caught the ‘ol eye. For more info visit the source, http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_41_new_feat.html.

VMware is touting ESXi big time with this release, its now time for us to depart from our old friend the Service Console.
ESXi Boot from…

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Originally I had submitted to speak about Cisco’s Nexus 1000v virtual switch at VMworld.  A few days after I did that Cisco offered to do a joint presentation with them so that has been my focus, but long story short that may not happen as some things have changed on the Cisco side.  A lot [...]

As I’m flying back to North Carolina from my one whole day at EMC World I was thinking a bit about the announcements that EMC has made this week.  VPLEX is a very interesting product and I was going over possible use cases in my head. If money was no object, or if you needed [...]

Lately I’ve been working on several implementations of the Cisco Nexus 1000v.  While doing so we’ve hit a couple of annoying bugs.  The first one was in a pretty simple environment.  The customer had a number of vSphere hosts with six NICs connected to a single uplink used for VM traffic.  The six NICs were [...]

If you try to connect to a VM’s console from the VI Client and receive something similar to: Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to server esx4.mydomain.com:903 Almost every time you see this it’s DNS. So check that first. Refer to this KB article too. For me, I knew it wasn’t DNS [...]

I just finished up another installation of the Nexus 1000v at a customer site a few days ago and thought it a fitting time to talk about what the Nexus 1000v has to bring to the table. The Background A little background in the Nexus 1000v is in order. The 1000v is just a virtual [...]

We’re starting to see a serious uptake in interest in deploying the Nexus 1000v virtual distributed switch.  I believe the latest service release calmed some fears about this new product and having some references to point at always helps.  As we perform more implementations we’re starting to see some things that customers need to be [...]

I understand that may not be a fair question.  In many cases there are things that just can’t be virtualized, and I don’t mean for performance reasons.  I’m talking about non-X86 workloads and applications with specialized hardware.  Don’t forget about the dreaded dongle that some apps still require!
One thing that I find very interesting to [...]

This is an update and bit of a rewrite of an earlier post I made here.  I wanted to add more detail and information now that I’ve worked with the Nexus 1000v more.
If you’ve read a lot of the Varrow blogs you’ll see information and talk about Cisco’s Nexus technology and products.  To be blunt, [...]

VMware released Update 1 for vSphere and vCenter this week.  Nothing truly Earth shattering but a few nice enhancements in theres:
vSphere Update 1

VMware View 4.0 support – Makes sense given the release of View 4.0.
Windows 7  and Windows 2008 R2 support – Again, timely update.
Enhanced Clustering Support for Windows Cluster – Not really adding anything [...]

First, if your interested in the new Cisco UCS blade system and haven’t checked out the Varrow channel on YouTube lately, you should.  We’ve added several new videos from a customer while doing their UCS install.  Pretty neat stuff.
Just finished up another video for our collection.  This one walks you through configuring Fibre Channel over [...]

Just a little FYI.  If you aren’t paying attention when configuring your port-profiles which turn in to your VMware Port Groups the default maximum number of ports is 32.  If you try to add another server you’ll get the following error:
The resource vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPort is not available in vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPortgroupYourPortGroupHere.
It’s an easy fix.  Just go to the [...]

Just a little tip in case someone else hits this.  If you have an ESX host that can’t scan for updates or gets the following error in vCenter check the DNS config:
Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store.  Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details.
This [...]

    I, like you, am trying to make sense of vSphere’s new Pluggable Storage Architecture or PSA. Acronym’s galore float through that camp, so if your not careful you may find yourself in the middle of cosmic confusion. So here’s my crack at the different functions of each plug-in and specifically their interrelations. Up first…
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