vSphere Upgrade Saga: Migrating Existing Hosts to vSphere 5, Host Profiles not Enough!

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.

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?

New Year and New Exam – Prepping for the VCP5

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012 and as is customary this time of year, I would like to start things out in 2012 with a New Year’s Resolution. My resolution this year is to take the VMware VCP5 exam before the class requirement grace period comes to an end for all of us VCP4s. When I see that someone has made a post that they passed an exam that I need to take, I have a question that immediately comes to my mind. What did you use as your reference and study material? Since the clock is ticking for a lot of us to complete the exam, I wanted to share some of the resources that I will be using and hopefully if you have something else that you use, please comment and share your secrets.

Data Protection: Implement before you Need It

Data Protection techniques should be implemented and tested long before they are needed. This is a necessary component of any IT organization. However, the most recent communities podcast brought to light several implementation aspects of Data Protection, specifically about Disaster Recovery: organizations still do not test their DR plans and organizations are waiting for a hardware refresh to implement a DR plan.

Citrix Release CloudGateway Enterprise v1: Aggregated Cloud Access Nearer than the Horizon?

CloudGateway is a unified service broker that aggregates, controls and delivers all apps and data, including Windows, web, SaaS and mobile, to ANY device, anywhere. It provides end-users with an intuitive single point of access via Citrix Receiver and self-service to all their business apps on any device anywhere, and provides IT with a comprehensive single point of aggregation and control for all apps.

Cloud: Developing over the Chasm in 2011

Now, of course, this is a simplified version of the question, because in almost all cases Infrastructure Clouds and Platform Clouds are built on Virtual Infrastructure, and in most cases Platform Cloud is built on Infrastructure Cloud, so the question is really about how far into the Cloud you should be prepared to go. My perspective here is of a development manager – someone who is charged with building a new application. I’m thinking as a development manager not a developer and I’m taking decisions to maximise the productivity of a development team – rather than on the “shininess” of the technology.