I recently “upgraded” my aging storage environment in my home lab with an all-flash Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro with 12 x 2TB NVMe M.2 Drives, with upgraded RAM to 16 GB, running TrueNAS Scale v22.12.3.3. Just an FYI, everything is connected at 10Gb, unless otherwise noted. Here’s a few of my thoughts so far:
Category: VMware
How-To: Convert .qcow2 to .vmdk for VMware Using MacOS
This How-To will show you how to convert a .qcow2 virtual machine file to a VMware based .vmdk, using your Mac running MacOS.
Easily create a bootable USB installer for VMware ESXi / vSphere Hypervisor from a Mac
A huge thank you to Chris Bednarski (over at http://cbednarski.com/) for putting together a script that will make an installable ESXi boot device (via a Mac), something that would seem pretty simple to do nowadays, but after trying 2 other online “tutorials” that didn’t work, Chris’ script worked perfectly. Thanks! Script/instructions are over at: https://github.com/cbednarski/vmware-usb-osx
Deploying the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 from Mac OS
This article will show you how to deploy the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 from the Mac OS, using the now native VCSA installer for Mac, which is located on the VCSA install media.
Installing VMware PowerCLI Cmdlets from the PowerShell Gallery
A great writeup for this process with detailed information is located here: https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2017/04/powercli-install-process-powershell-gallery.html In a nutshell: You might be prompted for a new version of “NuGet”, which is fine- go ahead and say “yes” to the prompt to install. Then proceed with the below. Once that completed, the VMware PowerCLI Cmdlets were installed. However, when […]
VMware VSAN – Many SAS or Less SATA?
Staying on the VSAN topic, another great topic of discussion is whether to use many higher speed SAS drives or less SATA drives that have a greater capacity? The answer here is the typical “it depends”. A lot has to do with the workload you’re planning on running in the VSAN Disk Group and how […]
Great Resource for VMware NSX
Here is a great resource for NSX. The site Hypervizor.com by Hany Michael, a Consulting Architect at VMware. One of his recent posts covers the architecture of NSX v6.0. He also has some great videos on walking through the process of deploying and configuring the different NSX components. You can follow Hany on twitter @hany_michael. […]
Celebrating 15 Years of VMware
You might know that VMware is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter. You might even know that VMware now has over 13,800 employees and 500,000 customers. But did you know that our headquarters consumes more than 12,000 pounds of coffee and 19,000 pounds of M&Ms every year? VMware has […]
VMware vSphere v5.5 Hardening Guide
The Hardening Guide for vSphere v5.5 has been released and is now available here. If you are not familiar with the vSphere Hardening Guides, they can be used to help secure the majority of your VMware environment. It will not only help to ensure that your Virtual Machines are secure, but also the ESXi Hosts, […]
VMware – Fixing “Invalid” Virtual Machines
In either ESX 3.x or vSphere, if there are disk array or networking issues, some Virtual Machines may appear in the vSphere Client as being “Invalid” and they are greyed out. To fix these VM’s, we have been able to follow the below steps successfully. We tried steps as given to us from VMware support and […]