I’m helping start a local San Luis Obispo VMware User Group.  Anyone withing driving range of San Luis Obispo is welcome to come.  This is a great opportunity to come together with your fellow VMware users to discuss virtualization trends,… Continue Reading →

I passed the NS0-502 NetApp Certified Implementation Engineer-SAN and Virtualization test today.  I had the good fortune to take some instructor led courses for this from Fastlane – Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Administration (DOT87M) and Accelerated NCDA Boot Camp Data… Continue Reading →

The best part of VMworld 2011 was THE LABS!!! How do you have a 500 seat lab operating 0800-2000 daily with NO PC’s OR SERVERS in a back room?  The cloud. Read more…

UPDATE! CISSP granted to me on Sep 22, 2011! Security is one of the many things I do.  I chose to go after the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) for a variety of reasons.  One and perhaps the most… Continue Reading →

Never grow a disk if the machine has snapshots.  Even if the GUI lets you. This morning I got a request to grow a virtual disk on a vm.  What you should do is look at the machine and see… Continue Reading →

If your VMware ESX hosts are like our ESX hosts, the hosts are in clusters and you have Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) enabled.  So in the vCenter GUI, when you right click a host and select “Enter Maintenance Mode”, DRS… Continue Reading →

I’m located in a fairly rural area, far away from our friendly local NetApp service engineer.  I recently had some hardware issues with a FAS 3140 storage system.  After opening a ticket on NetApp’s support site, and trying various things… Continue Reading →

VMware vSphere version 4.1 introduced various new features, including vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI).  If you are using storage that supports VAAI (and most storage vendors are implementing it over time) then you can offload some storage intensive tasks… Continue Reading →

I’ve been a VMware administrator for a while now, but a co-worked recently showed me this handy trick.  This assumes that you can do a Storage vMotion, This requires you to have the right version of vSphere, like Enterprise or… Continue Reading →

We have an older machine room that has been through many years of equipment changes.  As a result, it doesn’t have *ahem* optimal cooling systems.  Some of our more active systems have been having cooling issues recently, and here’s what… Continue Reading →