This morning I was watching some episodes of VMworld TV, one of the episodes announces the release of the iPAD vSphere Management App. This newly created app will be released at VMworld Europe (tweet from @vConsult). Funny detail in the video; the app is connecting to VMware ESXi 5.0 
For more VMworld TV check the YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/vmworldtv
After I started posting on my weblog again it was time to upgrade the WordPress installation. I was still running on (the very old) 2.7 version. Now, 20 minutes later, I’m running 3.0.1.
A minut ago I was reading on Eric Sloofs blog (ntpro.nl) and I noticed the following line in the article SRM Futures: Host Based Replication;
Host based replication (HBR) is the ability to replicate VM’s between dissimilar storage. Meaning for example, from an ESX local hard drive to a storage array in a different location. This technology will be in a future version of SRM and it will allow you to protect a remote location as if you had replicating storage arrays in common between it and your main datacenter. SRM will allow you to replicate individual VM’s as part of a protection strategy. This replication will be done without guest agents and is managed inside SRM.
I’m looking forward to this feature since not every costumer has enough $$ or €€ to use storage replication.
Today I wanted to record the installation of VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1 using VMware workstation. It turns out that ESXi 4.1 cannot run in VMware Workstation 7.0, after the upgrade to 7.1 everything works just fine.
Installation video;
A few minutes ago I took a quick look at the summary tab of my cluster. In the VMware HA box I noticed the following line: “Current Failover Capacity: 0 hosts”…
After opening the “HA Advanced Runtime Info” link it turns out I had only 80 HA Slots in my cluster (256 MHz, 2 vCPU’s and 2048MB RAM). After some research I detected 1 VM with a memory reservation (2048MB), after I removed the reservation the available slots jumped from 80 to 329
The HA box now say “Current Failover Capacity: 4 hosts”. Just another example why you don’t want to use reservations in a vSphere cluster.
For more details and technical background regarding VMware HA I suggest reading the “HA Deepdive” article written by Duncan Epping @ yellow-bricks.com: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/
After the upgrade of vCenter yesterday, the goal for today was to upgrade 2 hosts to ESXi 4.1. The old hosts are running VMware ESX 4.0, since vSphere 4.1 is the last release containing VMware ESX I decided to make the move to ESXi to be prepared for future releases.
Because I was running ESX I had to perform new installations on the metal. The initial installation of ESXi 4.1 is pretty strait forward, just download the installable iso, burn it to a CD-ROM, put it into the server, boot from the CD, answer some questions and you’re ready to go.
I was surprised that all my old ESX 4.0 configuration scripts (PowerCLI) after some minor changes worked on the new ESXi host.
Bottom line, 2 hosts down, 6 to go.