Blog.
- February 28, 2017
vCenter Permissions and Roles: Getting It Right From Day One
vCenter’s role-based access control is one of those configuration areas that gets set up once during initial deployment and then rarely revisited — until someone has more access than they …
- January 17, 2017
vSphere HA: Configuring It Right for Small Environments
vSphere High Availability is one of the primary reasons to run VMware over standalone hypervisors. When configured correctly, it automatically restarts VMs on surviving hosts when a host fails — …
- December 14, 2016
ESXi Host Profiles: Configuration Consistency Across a Growing Cluster
In a two-host cluster, keeping ESXi hosts configured identically is manageable manually. By the time you have six or eight hosts, configuration drift is inevitable unless you have a systematic …
- October 4, 2016
vCenter SSL Certificate Issues: The One That Bit Me Three Times
Certificate issues in vSphere environments are the most reliable source of annoying, hard-to-diagnose problems I’ve encountered. They show up at upgrade time, after hardware changes, when adding …
- September 6, 2016
vSphere Update Manager: First Deployment Lessons Learned
vSphere Update Manager (VUM) is the centralized patch management component for ESXi hosts. When it works, patching 20 ESXi hosts is barely more effort than patching one. When it’s misconfigured …
- July 11, 2016
When to Add vCenter: The Decision That Changes Everything
Running standalone ESXi hosts is a common starting point for small businesses. It’s simple, cost-effective, and covers a lot of ground. But there’s a clear inflection point where …
- May 9, 2016
Migrating from XenServer to VMware ESXi: The Practical Guide
At some point the XenServer environments I deployed for cost reasons hit a wall — either the organization’s needs grew beyond what XenServer’s ecosystem could support cleanly, or a …
- April 20, 2016
ESXi Networking Basics: vSwitches, Port Groups, and Where People Go Wrong
VMware’s virtual networking model is one of the most powerful things about the platform and one of the most common sources of misconfiguration in smaller deployments. The concepts are learnable …
- February 8, 2016
Starting with ESXi on Bare Metal: Hardware Selection for Small Business
The question I got asked most often when starting ESXi deployments for small and mid-size businesses: what hardware should we buy? The honest answer is “it depends,” but there are enough …
- November 30, 2015
XenServer Snapshot Gotchas: Why Snapshots Aren't Backups
Snapshots are the most misunderstood feature in virtualization. On XenServer, the confusion is compounded by the fact that snapshots look useful for backup purposes and are easy to take. Let me save …