Online VMware Training

In my previous post "Running the VMware vSphere Hypervisor stateless" I’ve explained how to setup an ESXi deployment server, but now we are going to take it one step further. To be able to save the ESXi configuration settings there’s a CCBoot feature available which is called “Write Back”. In this episode (HD) I’m going to show you how to enable “Write Back” for both the ESXi host and the CCBoot server. After rebooting the ESXI host the configuration will be preserved.

This video

vSphere 4.1 introduces a load-based teaming (LBT) policy that ensures vDS dvUplink capacity is optimized. LBT avoids the situation of other teaming policies in which some of the dvUplinks in a DV Port Group’s team were idle while others were completely saturated just because the teaming policy used is statically determined.

In this video I’ll show you how you use the VI Client user interface to deploy the CapacityIQ appliance. VMware distributes the appliance as a .zip file that includes an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) file. After the import the CapacityIQ OVF file, I’ll also show you how to configure the virtual appliance.

In this (HD) video I’ll show you a new vSphere 4.1 feature regarding configuring USB Device Pass-through from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine. You can configure a virtual machine to use USB devices that are connected to an ESX/ESXi host where the virtual machine is running. The connection is maintained even if you migrate the virtual machine using vMotion.

During my weekly VMware training sessions, I’m always getting a bit excited when we reach the module where the ESX and virtual machine memory is covered. I’m trying to explain how important it is; not to use the virtual machine memory limit setting and very often students believe me after checking out their own production environment for ballooning activity and 9 out of 10 times they find a few virtual machine which have a memory limit configured. The memory limit is the upper limit on memory the ESX host makes available to virtual machine.

If you don’t have a fancy physical iSCSI target in your lab but still want to do some testing with the esxcli command, Starwind software offers a great iSCSI alternative with their StarWind iSCSI SAN software. It can be used as shared storage for almost any application, it is fully compatible for use with VMware.

The Operations Panel is a script tool, which runs on the client browser and extends the default ESX server web page with a short list of all available virtual machines. It gives the user the ability to perform simple power operations (start, stop, suspend, resume). Easily accessible user interface for some of the most common operations on an ESX host, available directly from the ESX home page.

Caveat when using - Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity

I’ve created a new tool called the vmFilemanager; this tool is completely built on the VIX API 1.10 Beta. It’s not available for download yet, but I’ve recorded a demo which show how to copy files into a virtual machine. The awesome part is that I’ll also show you how easy it is to create such a tool in the free version of Microsoft Visual Basic 2008, AKA the Express Edition.

If you want to create great looking diagrams with data from the vCenter database look at this demo I’ve recorded with MS SQL Code Factory. It’s a premier Microsoft SQL GUI tool aimed at the SQL queries and scripts development. It is a good choice for everyone who need build SQL statements and edit SQL scripts with a convenient easy-to-use interface. The software provides you with a convenient easy-to-use interface, so it really does not require a deep knowledge of Microsoft SQL from its users.

NFS is a great storage solution within a VMware vSphere environment but when the connection to the NFS server is lost, you’re in big trouble. In most circumstances some virtual machines are still connected to the NFS Datastore and since it’s in use, you cannot delete and recreate it. I’ve tried this by using the vSphere Client and trough the command line but didn’t succeed. In the end there’s no other alternative than rebooting the ESX host, or is there… If you want to find out how to remount an NFS Datastore you better watch this online training.