VMware Horizon View 5.3 is now generally available (GA) for download. View 5.3 brings a number of cool features and if you haven’t heard about them yet be sure to check out my VMware Horizon View 5.3 announcement post. Lots of improvements for such a tiny version number change!
Download it now, VMware View 5.3.
Grab the View 5.3 documentation here.
VMware has announced that they have released a View Client for Android tablets available on the Android Market now. Here are just a few of the features found on the new client.
In case you missed it somehow, VMware released ESXi 5.5 Update 1 this week. In the last update I also used the command line to upgrade my Intel NUC hosts, which worked flawlessly. This time I’ve updated via command line as well and this is how.
If you don’t already know, VMware Update Manager (aka, VUM) is a tool which allows you to easily automate patching and upgrading VMware hosts as well as virtual machine hardware and VMware tools. It’s a wonderful tool and makes upgrading and patching so much easier and allows you to quickly see how compliant/up-to-date your environment is with the built in pie graph.
Recently we had some pretty serious array issues which corrupted the VUM database taking Update Manager down. Since we was going to have to rebuild Update Manager I opted to move from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012, in the steps below I’ll document step by step how to install VMware Update Manager 5.5 on Server 2012 and a separate database.
Read More “How to install VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.5”
There have been a ton of exciting announcements coming out of VMword 2013, one of which is vSphere 5.5 and all of it’s improvements and additions. Along that note, VMware has changed ESXi 5.5 free version to remove the physical RAM limit which was limited to only 32GB in version 5.1.
The new virtual hardware, version 10, we can now grow our home labs into more powerful VM’s as most all configuration maximums have been doubled:
The other day, one of our volumes in the lab environment filled up. This volume has a couple large VM’s on it, coupled with a couple different Veeam backup jobs running using the native Veeam backup methods as well as using NetApp snap mirror to snapshot the volume and then using Veeam to ship it out to Azure.
At any rate the volume filled up to the point where vCenter wasn’t allowing me to migrate VM’s off the datastore. I really didn’t want to expand the volume just so I could move VM’s off of it.
Instead, I decided to delete some of the older proof of concept snapshots from SnapMirror. Below are the quick and easy steps to clear up some un-used snapshots and free up some space on the datastore.
Read More “How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots”
For a little while now we’ve been seeing RedHat Linux virtual machines performing poorly. Tasks would take considerably longer on the Linux VM’s then other Windows VM’s. After digging around I eventually found that RedHat has it’s own IO scheduler that runs in the background. On a physical box this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as a virtual machine everything is already being processed by VMware hypervisor. The fix, disable the IO Scheduler!
Read More “Improve Linux VM IO performance by disabling IO Scheduler”