Yes i know, it’s been a while since my last post anyway . In a few days I’ll be heading back to my hometown of Sydney (via Tokyo – I love Japan) for a few weeks, so the internets will be a little less ranty for a little while. And unfortunately, I’ll be missing the [...]

Todays announcement from EMC, Cisco and VMware (ECV) amounted to a declaration of war on the datacenter players in the industry as we know it. But it wasn’t the only thing that it amounted to – I see it as the first true sign of utility computing, and if the rest of the industry just [...]

So after my last post, VMware did some digging and the real reason for the initially odd behaviour was exposed – it’s a combination of the way Virtual Hardware 7 presents virtual disks to Guests, and the difference in default policy settings of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. So in [...]

UPDATE This post is actually woefully inaccurate – go read this one instead! I don’t like making posts like this, really i don’t. As much as I’ll sing the praises of VMware ’til I can’t sing no more, I’ll also point out the shortcomings – I don’t turn a blind eye just because I like the [...]

Pretty sneaky of me to post my thoughts on the exam material the night before sitting the exam eh? Well, not really, but at least I’m not going to make you all anxiously wait for the follow up post like I know you were. C’mon, I know it. Seriously. Somebody was. Other than me. And [...]

I hate exams. Or rather, I hate the type of exam that is typified by pretty much all the IT certifications I’ve bothered to attain over the years. In fact I hate them so much, the only thing stopping me from swearing right now is that I don’t want to get John in trouble (again). [...]

Anyone who has read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work will know the story of the black swan. In a nutshell, the story goes that up until about 220 years ago, the Olde World thought that all swans were white. The basis for this was of course purely empirical – out of the millions of confirmed swan [...]

For those of you confused by the title of this post, don’t be… one of the things that keeps me interested in my job is the diversity I am allowed. My senior management likes to use an analogy of a capital letter “T” – that is, you should have a deep level of expertise in [...]

I’m posting this here more so I don’t forget it (Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?), but I think some of you will also find it useful if you don’t know [...]

I must admit, configuring stuff on HP boxes via their Integrated Lights Out (iLO) is something you don’t have to do often… generally you do it when you set a new box up and that’s it. But with the amount of blades coming into the lab these days, I figured it was about time I [...]

As I mentioned in the video that accompanied my Ghetto vCenter 4.0 Unattended Installer post, the vCenter 4.0 command line installer has a minor bug, in that if you don’t have Named Pipes enabled on your remote SQL Server, a warning message will pop up and halt the installation until you hit OK. You don’t [...]

As you’ve probably read on a few other blogs more popular than this one (only just though ), I have penned a chapter in an upcoming book, vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide. It was a collaborative effort amongst 6 of us, EMC gun Bernie Baker, Vizioncore Technical Architect Thomas Bryant III, Licensed to vKill [...]

I don’t know what is going on at HP these days, I really don’t. Either the VMware / HP relationship is souring a bit, or HP have appointed an imbecile in charge of their side of the deal. For reasons unknown to man, HP never followed the path of Dell and IBM by integrating their CIM [...]

In the words of Jack Nicholson’s Joker (well… almost), it’s time to clean out the crap from the Cloud and everything the IT media has associated with it over the past year or so, and get down to business. I’m going to make a bold statement here, and don’t mean any disrespect to anyone in doing [...]

Yes the title of this post is correct… ESXi unattended installation. Now that I’m staring down the barrel of ESXi installations as opposed to just PXE booting it (long story, let’s not go there… nothing to do with VMware, everything to do with finite engineering resources where I work), I thought I may as well [...]

This has been a while coming, and rather than wait longer to get some conditional logic into the script to allow you to use it on 32bit Windows i thought I’d just get it out now. So basically, what we have is a HTA file (with all functions written in JavaScript – none of that [...]

Like most enterprises, we wrap up VMware tools with our own logic and install transforms… y’know, stuff like setting the video hardware acceleration level in the VM before running the tools installer so you don’t get pop-ups, not installing the hgfs driver, etc etc. The problem when a new version of tools comes out (ie along [...]

The latest installment of the VMware Coffee Talk Webinars was today, covering off the soon to be released VMware Studio 2.0. But the amount of change and feature enhancements that have gone into this new version, it could seriously skip a few numbers and go straight to 6.0 or something – it’s a _massive_ release, [...]

This is something that has quietly been boiling away in the depths of the cavern of my mind for a while now – why is it that all the big name orchestration tools on the market (currently) target developers? You need to know Javascript if you want to do anything interesting with VMware vCenter Orchestrator, [...]

With the arrival of vSphere 4.0, it’s a good time to revisit your guest standards. Not just what virtual hardware and resource allocations you use by default, but also what standard software you deploy into the guest. Virtualisation has been labelled a game changing technology, but when most people talk of this, they refer to [...]