I actually have two home labs in use for Virtualization testing. The first is the traditional hardware lab, and the second is a lab built using one system. One stays at home and the other travels with me every where I go.

In my continuing story on upgrading to VMware vSphere it is possible to use Host Profiles even without an Enterprise Plus license, at least for a short period of time. Check out my Blue Gears blog on Network World for the complete story.

Read the ongoing saga of the next phase of the upgrade on the Network World Blue Gears site.

I have been trying to upgrade from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere 4, but it is not as simple as that. First you have to upgrade VMware vCenter then upgrade ESX 3 to ESX 4. That all sounds wonderful, but I have one little issue. I am running VMware vCenter with MS SQL 2000, which is no longer supported.

In my desire to limit the amount of power my Virtual Environment draws, I am in the midst of decommissioning my DLT4 Tape Libraries in favor of a DISC Blu-Safe which holds 15 50GB Read/Erasable (RE) Blu-Ray disks. This unit draws less power than my larger Dell PowerVault 128T or the Breecehill Q7 I used …

Continue reading “DISC Blu-Safe to the Rescue”

In my previous post I explained how SVMotion saved the day, this blog post is about the need for storage fabric redundancy. Storage fabric/network redundancy makes simple upgrades work without the need to power off any VMs or virtualization hosts. My recent upgrade to a Brocade 240E went smoothly once I could access the device.