This is the week end I move all my existing hosts to vSphere 5, to make way for some other work. Actually, I will migrate 2 of 3 hosts, while leaving one host at vSphere 4, more later on why. While Host Profiles has greatly improved, it is still not sufficient when updating and migrating nodes that use physical virtual NIC devices such as HP Flex-10. Why? Because they want to know the MAC Address when you apply the profile. This is a chicken and the egg sort of approach to Host Profiles.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an author, analyst, developer, technologist, and business owner. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and TVP Strategy where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: Adding New Host Crashes vCenter
As you know from my previous post, I just added a new blade to my environment. But everything was not as clean as I desired. For some reason when I went to move a existing node from one vSphere Cluster to another, vCenter crashed. I thought it was the state in which I left the node, but alas it was not. So what would make vCenter Crash, VMware Update Manager stop showing up as a plugin, and other management tools suddenly stop working, when they worked fine before?
vSphere Upgrade Saga: New Blade, More Memory, More Problems
I recently purchased my 4th blade and enough memory to bring 3 of my nodes to 3x what they had before. However, this upgrade was not without its issues. Memory upgrades were no issue, but adding the 4th blade to my c3000 was a pretty significant issue.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: It is All About EVC
I was a little confused about EVC recently, and hopefully this will clear it up for many others. My vSphere 5 Upgrade has been halted due to work, family, and my travel schedule. I wanted to put out one more staging tip for vSphere 5 with respect to EVC. This will come in handy later as I add in a new blade with a pair of Intel Westmere chips so I can play with AES&I as well as the new Intel TXT functionality.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: Staging Upgrade to vSphere 5
I have done all my homework, planned my upgrade to vSphere 5, ensured my licenses are available and all that, so now it is time to stage the upgrade using my spare node.Why stage the upgrade and not perform it? By staging using my spare node, I am able to test to see if firmware and other upgrades work appropriately. This is crucial to the success of the upgrade of the other nodes. In essence, all other subsystems are upgraded before I hit the production nodes, which means vCenter is also upgraded but first I backup my databases, etc. As well as the VM running vCenter.
WordPress: Optimizing Steps
As you know, I have been working with my Wordpress installation to improve security, but also to improve site optimization and speeds to download, etc. In this tools such as Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow have been incredibly useful. My goal has been to increase the Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow scores to as high as possible. This takes quite a bit of effort to achieve, I had some failed starts, bad plugins, and the need to code things to optimize the site more. So here is how I achieved my current score of 82/100 with Pagespeed. More work will be done with the ultimate goal of achieving 100/100, but that will take quite a bit of coding it appears.