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?

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.

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.

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.

I use a 90-95% virtualized environment and here is a brief update of how I integrated my Mac Book pro into this environment. Specifically about printing. Some notes first:

Print Server: Windows 2008 R2 running as a VM

Printer connected to a Belkin FL5009 USB over IP devices

This configuration seems fairly straight forward, but since I use passwords and heightened security…

While at Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, thank you Stephen for the invitation and Claire for setting up everything, I had the opportunity to make some observations of how best to succeed as a presenter to the Tech Field Day delegates. Tech Field Day delegate love to talk about technology, but we also talk about bad presentations. This is not how you want us to remember your company. So without much further ado, here are the basic rules.