VMDSC 1.1.0

Last week (4/25/2022) we released an exciting new update to the Virtual Machine Desired State Configuration (VMDSC) VMware Fling (https://flings.vmware.com/virtual-machine-desired-state-configuration). This update includes several fixes and enhancements including a new feature that has been requested many times by customers since the Fling was originally released; the ability to specify Cores per Socket in addition to…Continue Reading “Configure VM Cores per Socket with Virtual Machine Desired State Configuration (VMDSC) 1.1.0”

vSAN ROBO - ESXi - Front

Introduction I recently presented at a VMUG event where I outlined the entire process of designing, deploying, configuring, and managing a Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) vSAN environment with one of my customers.  I figured since I put in all the work to present this for a small VMUG audience, I might as well throw it on…Continue Reading “vSAN ROBO Project – Design & Config”

VM Powered Off Duration

Update: 10/25/2019Good news! Mr. Brandon Gordon reached out and informed me of a way to accomplish everything I have outlined below with a simple out-of-the-box feature available in vRealize Operations 7.5 and newer. The VM Property “Summary|Runtime|Power State” can be added to a View and transformed to a ‘relative timestamp’ value to show the number…Continue Reading “Tracking VM Powered Off Duration with vRealize Operations”

Exchange Dashboard

I have heard many customers ask the question “Can vRealize Operations be configured to provide our application teams access so that they can see dashboards/metrics for only the objects they are responsible for?”. Of course the answer is “YES”; however, there is not a lot of out-of-the-box workflows to accomplish this and the process is…Continue Reading “Configuring vRealize Operations (vROps) for Application Teams”

Resource Pools

About a year ago I had a customer ask me if grouping VMs in Resource Pools could impact performance and after seeing Frank Denneman‘s recent blog (The public Shaming of Resource Pool-as-a-Folder User) I figured I would write up a quick explanation.  I generally recommend my customers stay away from resource pools if at all…Continue Reading “Performance Impacts from Grouping VMs in Resource Pools”

vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server

****UPDATE**** VMware has recently announced the End of Availability (EOA) of vRealize Log Insight for vCenter. This means that the next version of vRealize Log Insight (yet to be released) will not accept a vCenter Server Standard license key to provide a 25-OSI pack entitlement. Version 4.6.x and older will continue to provide this functionality….Continue Reading “If you own vCenter Server, then you own THIS too…”

Welcome to Part II of my Home Lab Introduction blog series where I will be focusing further on the installation/configuration of the VMware environment.  If you missed Part I where I reviewed the lab from a hardware perspective it can be found here.  I will not be covering the install of ESXi itself; however, I…Continue Reading “Home Lab Introduction – Part II – Install/Config”