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Reducing the Cost of Delivering Compute Services in vCloud Environments

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vCD adds an additional layer of complexity when it comes to managing VMs and vApps belonging to vCD.  Those VMs and resources to be cost effective, must be right sized, placed on the right tier of storage to match business needs and SLAs, and at the same time achieve this with least administrative effort. Why […]

Windows 8.x Desktop Tweaks

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One of the principal troubles since W8 has been around is the problem with start menu. Microsoft corrected that a bit in Windows 8.1 preview, but the Metro is still in the way and the start menu present in W 8.1 preview isn’t a really what we use to have since ages. I’ll show you […]

vSphere Big Data Extensions Beta 1.0 – Hadoop on VMware

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VMware has announced recently a new extension for Big Data called vSphere Big Data Extensions. Currently in public Beta, the product allows the integration between Project Serengeti and vSphere. The in-between layer is the vSphere Big Data Extensions, which is visible in vSphere via a plugin through a vSphere Web client. The vSphere Big Data […]

PernixData FVP in my lab

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I’ve been testing PernixData FVP since some time now. FVP dramatically accelerates shared storage used by virtual infrastructures running VMware vSphere as it offloads the writes destined to the SAN by using local SSD storage in each host. FVP creates a pooled flash layer which allows to write to locally attached SSDs before sending those writes […]

WIM to VHD converter

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Way back I wrote about some tools used to convert VHD to VMDK or the other way around. There is another interesting tool, especially for those experimenting with Hyper-V and Microsoft based hypervizor. This is a tool that allows you to take the WIM file off of a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 […]

Windows 8 and Windows 7 Desktop Optimization Guide

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This PDF guide from VMware has 2 important scripts embedded, which allows disabling unneeded services of W7 or W8 systems. The Windows 8 and Windows 7 Desktop Optimization Guide provides detailed specification of those services, and in order to use in corporate environments, you should check in details each of those service’s function and validate (or […]

Visual ESX Top – New Free tool from VMware Labs

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New free utility from VMware Labs called Visual ESX Top. As you probably guessed, the free tool allows better viewing experience than the command line ESX Top. In addition, there is a tab which allows to show some nice graphics. The tool can be downloaded from VMware Labs as technical preview, so you must accept the […]

VMware Network Port Diagram

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VMware has published recently, through VMware KB article https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2054806, a very detailed and useful Network port diagram. This diagram covers several VMware products: VMware ESXi 5.x VMware vCenter Server 5.x VMware vCloud Director 5.x VMware Update Manager vCenter Orchestrator It shows you which ports are used by vCenter and the other products to communicates between each […]

How to run vCheck – to get you started

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vCheck is a community project started few years back by Alan Renouf. Since then it has been enhanced and updated several times, with the latest version 6 of the script recently enhanced and shared now at GitHub where the collaborative environment can be leveraged for further improvements. So How to run vCheck? There is possibility […]