Cloning Windows Server 2012 Domain Controllers on vSphere 5

Microsoft introduced a lot of virtualization awareness in Windows Server 2012, particularly for domain controllers.  They are, for the most part, considered virtualization “safeguards” in that they prevent against some of the classic problems of virtualizing domain controllers.  Historically things like virtual machine snapshots, restoring from virtual machine image backups, or cloning domain controllers was either difficult or impossible.  With…

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Windows 2012 Failover Clusters and vSphere 5.1

How many of you actually read through the release notes of a new vSphere release?  Ok, I know that Maish does.  If you read Maish’s post or read the vSphere 5.1 Release Notes you would see the following: Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering is not supported If you try to create a cluster for Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012,…

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Error 1711 When Upgrading vCenter to 5.1

I was recently going through the process of upgrading my home lab from vSphere 5.0 to 5.1.  Everything was going great until I got the following error: Error 1711. An error occurred while writing installation information to disk.  Check to make sure enough disk space is available, and click Retry, or Cancel to end the installation. I found a few…

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New in vSphere 5.1–Support for five node Failover Clusters

As has been the case with the last few vSphere releases, VMware has crammed vSphere 5.1 full of new features and functionality. I won’t try to go into all of the details since there are many blog posts out there already. Since virtualizing business critical applications is near and dear to my heart, one of the changes that immediately jumped…

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