I have collected quite a few updates over the last few weeks since VMworld ended, and now I should make them. However, the most important non-security update for me is the one for VMware Horizon View. My View environment is old, and though it is maintained, I am in need of several upgrades to Windows, View, and underlying bits. Given that I have nearly everything installed within my environment (except vCAC and vCD at the moment), it is time to find the proper upgrade order. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Update Order”

While continuing on my way toward getting a fully running RHEV set up on RHEL 7, I find myself facing two new problems. Neither has a simple solution. The first is the lack of support in RHEV for RHEL 7 as a hypervisor. The second concerns a change in Red Hat’s handling of virtualization licenses. Solving these issues will entail making some hard choices or spending lots of money.

Continue reading “RHEV Upgrade Saga: RHEL 7 Licensing and RHEV Support”

In order to use cache enhanced storage such as vFRC, VSAN, PernixData, SanDisk, etc., I had to upgrade my hardware to support better storage controllers that actually recognize SSDs as something more than just plain disks. For my environment, I had to replace my storage blades with something better that contained a supported storage controller. In addition, some new drives will be in order for those storage blades. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Upgrading for VSAN”

I was finally going to install RHEV on my brand-new system running RHEL 7 RC with KVM. However, it has a dependency on DNS. Which was fine, but my DNS server was on another network, not the private network used by KVM with the standard virtual bridge. To fix this, I chose to move my KVM installation to use Open vSwitch. I have written before about adding Open vSwitch to KVM as well as hooking VMs to the Open vSwitch; however, Open vSwitch 2.1 has its own idiosyncrasies, as does libvirt 1.1. Continue reading “RHEV Upgrade Saga: Installing Open vSwitch on RHEL 7”

Recently, my environment experienced a seemingly major catastrophe. The IBM DS3400 SAN I use experienced a two-drive failure, which meant the RAID 5 array was effectively gone. Or was it? I will cover why it was not completely lost in the following writeup, but most of my data was damaged, which forced me to restore what I could from backup and recreate my entire set of management tools. Luckily, however, email, AD, accounting, and other critical business data was not lost. Some was restored; some was rebuilt from the array.  Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Catastrophic Failure Recovery”

I recently received an HP ioDrive Accelerator for some testing and discovered that putting the device into the blade was just not enough to get it to work with VMware vSphere. There are a few other items to consider along the way. Since the ioDrive is a mezzanine card for the HP blade, it is important to understand how mezzanine cards connect within the blade enclosure and to the interconnects within the back of the enclosure. I found this out the hard way.

Here are the steps for installing an HP IO Accelerator (designed around ioMemory) within an HP BL460c for use by vSphere ESXi v5.1. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Adding Fusion-io to an HP BL460c”