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Deploying OVA/OVF to remote vCenter using OVFTool

23/11/2014 by Myles Gray 7 Comments

I had recently come across the need to deploy an OVA file remotely and didn’t want to have to upload the file over VPN to the destination vCenter, the solution is to install OVFTool on a server that has local access to the vCenter and deploy it using the following syntax: Why not follow @mylesagray […]

vSphere 6 Public Beta Now Open

01/07/2014 by Myles Gray Leave a Comment

It’s the time for another VMWare public beta, bound by NDA but there are some VERY exciting features! Sign up here. Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter for more like this!

Setting Up Multi-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5.5

07/06/2014 by Myles Gray 2 Comments

Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance: Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 and has improved in v5.5 – so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because […]

Updating VMWare Horizon Workspace vApp

03/06/2014 by Myles Gray Leave a Comment

It’s fairly straight forward to update your Horizon Workspace vApp to the latest (this is an out-of-hours update due to downtime): Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter for more like this!

Using NginX as a load-balancer for VMWare Horizon View security servers

07/04/2014 by Myles Gray 11 Comments

I have been deploying a VDI solution recently based on the fantastic VMWare Horizon Suite, one of the important points of deploying the Horizon View component of this is making it highly available and accessible from the outside for on-the-road users. The best way I have found to load-balance incoming connections (both internally and externally) […]

Using VMWare’s OVFTool to convert VMX to OVA

10/02/2014 by Myles Gray Leave a Comment

It’s sometimes necessary (say you’ve been working on a VM on your local workstation in either VMWare Fusion, or VMWare Workstation) to move the VM you’ve been playing with to an ESXi instance to either move into development or to have it properly backed up etc. The easiest way I find to do this is […]

Upgrading vCenter Server Appliance to vCSA 5.5

23/09/2013 by Myles Gray 6 Comments

So you’ve downloaded all the new VMWare 5.5 goodies and you want to upgrade your vCSA install to v5.5 – this is a little more involved than you may think, however it is very much worth the effort: In vSphere 5.5, the vCenter Server Appliance limitations have been extremely raised when using the embedded database: Previous […]

vSAN + vSphere 5.5 Release Date and Download

16/09/2013 by Myles Gray Leave a Comment

VMWare’s vSAN Community site has been launched today in preparation for the release of vSphere 5.5 including the new vSAN feature (clustered, replicated local storage on hosts acting as a “Virtual SAN”). You can have a look at the walkthroughs here. You can sign up for the beta program here, more vSAN info available here. […]

Zero free space using SDelete to shrink Thin Provisioned VMDK

05/09/2013 by Myles Gray 22 Comments

Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool “vmkfstools”, but first you […]