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It has been a crazy couple of weeks lately due to a data centre relocation I’ve been working on and due to this I haven’t had as much time to post new information and hence the delay of this next “instalment” of All Things Virtual.

• Firstly a massive thank you to Simon Long for adding my blog posting to his “Recommended Reads” section of his blog. It’s a true honour to be mentioned on his blog for something I posted. I would highly recommend looking through his recommended reads as he’s added some really great postings from some of the top blogs. Also a thank you to Troy Clavell on the VMware forums for linking back to my posting on the Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance error and solution. It’s been the most read posting on my blog for the past week because of his reference.
• Alessandro Perilli posted about VMware officially announcing the ESX end of life.  So for those of you out there like myself who are still trying to perfect your PowerCLi,VMA and vCLI skills, we now have a date that those skills need to be perfected. I still don’t fully buy into the whole reason for the removal of the COS but no point moaning over something that has already been decided.
• Next is something Darren Woollard ,who I follow on twitter tweeted about, which is a list of all the VMware twitter accounts. There was quite a few mentioned that I wasn’t following. As I’ve said before I believe the amount of knowledge to be gained from following people and organisation related to your field is priceless and it has certainly helped me gain better knowledge of virtualisation products and practices. I’m on twitter at @greggrobertson5 or http://twitter.com/greggrobertson5 if you want to follow me.
• Mentioning social media there is now a document on the VMworld website for anyone who is attending and plans to use social media during their visit to talk about VMworld and their experiences. I’ve already added my information to the document. *NB* Edit the document as far too many people aren’t reading the steps mentioned at the top and posting comments instead of editing the document. VMworld have also created their own channel on YouTube for all the news and videos of the events here
• Talking of VMworld ,Gestalt IT are doing a competition in which they’ll  pay airfare, hotel, and registration for VMworld for two lucky winners. It’s a great idea as the winners aren’t just picked at random but rather have to motivate how they are going to “pay it forward” by describing how they are going to give back to the virtualisation community by them going to VMworld.Good luck if you have or are going to enter
• Scott Drummonds posting a very interesting article on the idea of Designing VMs with Performance SLAs. The article is a very good one and is one that will encourage a very good debate on the positives and negatives of using limits which is one of the techniques Scott mentions in his posting to allow for Performance SLA’s.
• Tom Howarth has posted all about the session himself and Cody Bunch are doing at VMworld this year and is asking for some questions in preparation for the sessions from the community. Adam Carter of HP,Vaughn Stewart of NetApp and Chad Sakac of EMC are three of his speakers so if you you can think of any I’m sure Tom will be very grateful for your help.
• Duncan Epping of yellow bricks fame posted all about the ability now with vSphere 4 using ADAM to store the roles and permissions to have a standby vCentre Server in case of a disaster. I’m definitely going to get one of these built up having had the experience of a virtual centre server going awry and having to rebuild it all.
• With the release of vSphere 4.1 one of the new features is memory management and compression. Gabrie van Zanten has posted all about this feature, how it all works and how it will bring benefits to your VMware environments. A must read!
• If you are planning to upgrade any of your machines to vSphere 4.1 then I would highly recommend looking through and watching the video from the KB article all about…you guessed it vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations. I love finding and watching these kinds of things as it always feels as if I’ve actually been shown and taught it from a mentor or work colleague like you would in your daily jobs knowledge transfer. Vladan Seget has posted all about the Best practices KB on how-to install ESX 4.1 and vCenter which is another brilliant bit of information and reference if you are installing ESX4.1 and vCentre.
• The Malaysia VMware communities has done a very interesting posting all about the VSI plug-in from EMC. The plug-in is a brilliant tool and is a very good example of the VAAI that ESX 4.1 is enabling storage vendors to create for people to utilise in their VMware environments. Chad Sakac has done a great YouTube video on vSphere4.1 and EMC VAAI capabilities. Richard Brambley has done a brilliant posting a while back all about what VAAI is and what it means for virtualisation here.
• Talking of VMware and EMC Alan Renouf and Simon Seagrave of Virtu-al and Techhead respectively did a session at the last London VMUG all about Why EMC for VMware. Unfortunately even though the day was sponsored by EMC i wasn’t able to make it due to there being a mandatory quarterly results presentation on the same day, so as to not say the wrong information and because Alan covered it so well I encourage you to read his post :)
• Elasticsky have posted a very helpful video on YouTube on how to reset a forgotten or lost root password on vSphere 4. I have posted these steps before but the video is a very helpful addition to this if you ever have the problem.

         

• Scott Vessey has posted all about the Changes to VCP exam due to the vSphere 4.1 release.A number of people have been talking about if there are any changes to the vcp4 exams since the release of vSphere4.1 and Scott has answered it perfectly.
• Kendrick Coleman has done a brilliant resource page for all the resources you may need in your preparations for the VCAP DCA exam. I’m hoping to start building up my own list of resources that I'll be using in my preparations for my VCAP exam/s once I get it under way :).
• Lastly is one for anyone going to a convention or conference this year who will get themselves one of the customary backpacks. As Kevin Houston posted, if you aren’t planning to actively use the backpack why not donate it to a local school and fill it with some basic supplies. Great idea Kevin!

Gregg Robertson