Resolving .NET path issues when installing vRA App Services bootstrap
UPDATE: Much as I tried to get this to work with Windows Server 2012 R2, it won’t. You need to install .NET 2.0/3.0 on Windows Server 2012 R2 in order to get the bootstrap service to work. It will install everything properly but I was unable to get the Windows service to actually start without .NET 2.0/3.0. See screenshot to…
Find the right JRE filename when installing vRA Application Services Agent
As I said in a previous post, these days I’m more focused on cloud automation and orchestration than virtualizing business critical apps like I have been in the past. However, combining those two worlds is of interest to me so I’ve been playing with vRealize Automation Application Services. I was recently preparing a Windows Server 2012 R2 template to be…
The one where TiVo taught my wife about hybrid cloud
There’s a famous quote that says, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That statement is true. But I’m sure many of us have examples of where we’re challenged to explain something we know very well in a simple manner. Take the example of working in technology and explaining what you do to family or…
VMware Certified Professional Delta Exam
This weekend I had the opportunity to take the VMware Certified Professional Delta exam (VCP550D) to renew my VCP5-DCV certification for another two years. I wanted to share my thoughts on this exam specifically as well as the future of online exams. I’ll echo what I’ve read from other folks regarding this exam in that you need to know more…
Virtualizing Microsoft Lync 2013
It seems there is a bit of an uproar about a document Microsoft recently released called Planning a Lync Server 2013 Deployment on Virtual Servers. In that document, Microsoft makes some odd recommendations when virtualizing Lync, sync has disabling NUMA on physical servers and not using hyperthreading. To address these concerns, VMware has published a really nice blog post that…
Thoughts on EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
I’ve never been a prolific blogger like others in the virtualization community, but this year was especially bad. One of the reasons is that I’m in a new role with EMC which has changed my focus a bit. Still focused on virtualization, but less so on the business critical apps that I used to write more frequently about and more…
Thoughts on changes to TPS behavior in vSphere
This week VMware released a blog post and several knowledgebase articles about Transparent Page Sharing (TPS). In the next patch for ESXi, TPS will be disabled by default between virtual machines. TPS is the technology that allows virtual machines running on the same ESXi host to share identical memory pages, allowing ESXi to overcommit memory. This technology has been part…
Blogging is hard
As I type this, I see I haven’t written a blog post in over 5 months. I wish I had a good excuse for that but I don’t. The truth is it was really a number of different things: 1) Writing 3 books in one and a half years (from Nov. 2012 to April 2014) consumed a huge amount of…
vSphere Performance: The story behind my new book
I’m very happy to announce that my new book called VMware vSphere Performance, along with co-authors Rynardt Spies and Christopher Kusek, has been released! It’s available right now on Kindle format and the hard copy will be available on May 12th! The book is focused on providing guidance for how to design vSphere to get the best performance out of…
One Weird Trick to Virtualize Monster VMs–Consultants Hate This!
We’ve all seen those ads on the Internet that promise to teach us “one weird trick” that “<someone> hates” to do something easily. Make money fast? Yep. Lose belly fat? Check. Grow “other” parts of your body? Easy. I couldn’t resist stealing the headline for something that I’ve seen come up time and time again when virtualizing large applications…