M. Sean McGee blog about UCS and HP Virtual Connect

Sean,
is proven SME in this area and he has really good articles about UCS and other server/networking topics ...

http://www.mseanmcgee.com/about/

SpiceWorks - Free network management software & IT community

What do you get when you take network monitoring, a helpdesk, PC inventory tools, IT Reporting

and more… and combine it with an online community of IT pros exchanging practical how-tos and vendor reviews?

Spiceworks! The free “everything IT” network management software and IT community that 1.5 million IT pros worldwide use to simplify – and become better at – their jobs.

http://www.spiceworks.com/

How to mount vmware virtual disk (vmdk)

The Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is a collection of C libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation to help you create or access VMware virtual disk storage. The kit includes:

• The Virtual Disk and Disk Mount libraries, sets of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk files.
• C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler.
• Documentation about the VDDK libraries and the command-line utilities.
• The Disk Mount utility to access files and file systems in offline virtual disks on Windows or Linux guest virtual machines.
• The Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline virtual disk on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment).

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/

vSphere 5 Details - unofficial

In February this year, virtualization.info reported about VMware which exposed some of the upcoming features of vSphere 5 during its Partner Exchange. Last week even more details appeared online, these details leaked on a Turkish Web Forum, but were removed later. The post itself can still be retrieved from Google Cache though.

Besides, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage, Host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager, and Network I/O control for Virtual Machines, vSphere 5 will feature:

• Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
• vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
• Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
• Support for up to 1 TB of memory
• Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
• Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
• USB 3.0 device support
• UEFI virtual BIOS
• Host UEFI boot support
• New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
• Client-connected USB devices
• Smart card reader support for VMs
• Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
• Support for up to 512 VMs
• Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
• Improved SNMP support
• Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
• Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
• Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
• iSCSI user interface support
• Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
• Swap to SSD
• 2TB+ LUN support
• Storage vMotion snapshot support
• vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
• ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
• A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
• vCenter Server Appliance
• Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
• vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
• System message logging enhancements
• Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
• All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
• Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection

Install Dell OpenManage on ESXi 4.1 using vSphere CLI or vMA

http://defaultreasoning.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/install-dell-openmanage-on-esxi-4-1-using-vsphere-cli-or-vma/

VMware Virtual Machine Remote Console

VMware vmrc (Virtual Machine Remote Console)
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/156057?start=15&tstart=0
http://www.no-x.org/?p=458

VMware player as a remote console
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8840

VMRC to ESXi Guest
http://traviskensil.posterous.com/vmrc-to-esxi-guest

VMware-esxi-server vmware-vmrc console linux

vmware-vmrc vmware console for esxi-server via linux because there is no vsphere client for linux around at the moment!

1) download vmware server (in my case VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.exe

2) unpack it (install it on a windows machine)

3) get the file Programs/VMware/VMware Server/tomcat/webapps/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi

4) rename it to .zip, and unpack it

5) change dir to subfolder 'plugins' and start ./vmware-vmrc

Gateway to VMware resources

Your gateway to the VMware universe

http://vlp.vsphere-land.com/

Windows Server 2008 R2 Downgrade

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/downgrade-TC.aspx

VMware VSS Explained

http://www.vmguru.com/articles/data-protection/8-vmware-vss-explained

BixData

http://www.bixdata.com/
ixData is a comprehensive management solution for new, dynamic IT infrastructures being built with mixed virtualization. Bix's platform represents a profound innovation in management science, uniquely suited to the complex demands of this technology. Breakthrough p2p architecture condenses a full-feature management suite into a single streamlined, self-installing package.

BixData Solution - Mixed Virtualization Management

BixData integrates Monitoring, Management and Analytics for (physical and virtual) application, server, and network layers.

• for Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD; VMware, KVM and Xen
• Self-installs in less than 5 minutes
• Scales to 1000's of servers
• Consolidates management of VMware and Xen
• Orchestrates from a single graphical desktop

Rack Tables

Asset management of datacenter
http://racktables.org/

Orion solarwinds

Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) makes it easy to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues within your ever-changing corporate or data center network. It delivers real-time views and dashboards that enable you to visually track network performance at a glance. Plus, with our dynamic network topology maps and automated network discovery features, you can keep up with your evolving network without breaking a sweat. And Orion NPM is the easiest product of its kind to use and maintain, meaning you will spend more time actually managing networks, not supporting Orion NPM.

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/orion/

Simplify Virtualization Management

http://www.toutvirtual.com/index.php

VMware Support - Advanced Root Cause Analysis

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1717-Behind-the-scenes-at-VMware-Support-Advanced-Root-Cause-Analysis.html

http://www.slideshare.net/esloof/advanced-root-cause-analysis

NEXENTA Storage - NFS, iSCSI, CIFS

Enterprise class Open Storage

NexentaStor provides enterprise class unified storage capabilities via a software solution that ends vendor lock-in while delivering superior storage management functionality with a particular focus on virtualized environments.

http://www.nexenta.com/corp/

Zenoss Zenpacks

http://community.zenoss.org/community/zenpacks

The gateway to cloud storage

http://www.nasuni.com/

Oracle on VMware

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/03/more-on-oracle-and-vmwareincluding-other-must-see-resources.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FdsAV+%28Virtual+Geek%29

VCAP4-DCD Exam Simulation

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1698-VCAP4-DCD-Exam-Simulation.html

http://mylearn.vmware.com/courseware/82525/VCAPDCD_Tutorial.swf

VCAP-DCA Objective 2.2 : Configure and Maintain VLANs, PVLANs and VLAN settings

http://virtual-vargi.blogspot.com/2011/02/vcap-dca-section-2-22.html