Cyberfed27's Posts

I'm pretty sure you need to have your vCenter 5.0 SQL server up and running and point to it during the 5.5 install. vCenter has to make changes to the SQL database during the 5.0 -> 5.5 upgrade. ... See more...
I'm pretty sure you need to have your vCenter 5.0 SQL server up and running and point to it during the 5.5 install. vCenter has to make changes to the SQL database during the 5.0 -> 5.5 upgrade. Also restarting the management services on an ESXi host does not impact running VMs. I'm not too sure I'm following your question at the end?
I would go with option 2 personally. I don't like to put anything on my domain controllers. In my eyes DC's are DC's and shouldn't be doing anything else. Others may disagree. Just my 2 cents.
We have had the same issues randomly on some of our VM's. Sometimes triggered by Veeam other times just when manually deleting a snapshot in vCenter. The longest removal was about 3 hours. The VM... See more...
We have had the same issues randomly on some of our VM's. Sometimes triggered by Veeam other times just when manually deleting a snapshot in vCenter. The longest removal was about 3 hours. The VM itself was not particularly large in size. We haven't found a solution but it happens so infrequently that its more than a minor annoyance than anything else. We have some I/O latency issues on our SAN and we are pretty sure that's part of the issue.
Plan accordingly if you plan on having more than 5 hosts you are going to go want to go with full blown SQL rather than the free SQL express version. This assumes of course you are picking SQL fo... See more...
Plan accordingly if you plan on having more than 5 hosts you are going to go want to go with full blown SQL rather than the free SQL express version. This assumes of course you are picking SQL for your DB. You can also just deploy the vCenter appliance it comes with its own built in DB. Also keep in mind if you choose to host it on a Windows box with a DB back end you will not be able to migrate that over to the virtual vCenter appliance in the future and vice versa. We found ourselves in that boat, we are running vCenter with SQL and are tired of having to manage a Windows server just for vCenter, so we thought we would migrate to the virtual appliance. Nope not possible. Not a big deal but good knowledge to have PRIOR to deciding how to build your vCenter.
Check out this thread: Re: Host is unavailable for checking compliance.
It appears from your picture you have not created a datacenter. You will need to create a datacenter first and then manually add your ESXi hosts into that datacenter by either their IP or DNS nam... See more...
It appears from your picture you have not created a datacenter. You will need to create a datacenter first and then manually add your ESXi hosts into that datacenter by either their IP or DNS name. Assuming all the requirements are met you can then create a cluster for HA.
Is this for your job? If so find out what you are responsible for and learn that stuff first. If you are talking in general to educate yourself and prepare for the IT field I would go about it by... See more...
Is this for your job? If so find out what you are responsible for and learn that stuff first. If you are talking in general to educate yourself and prepare for the IT field I would go about it by first getting a firm understanding of TCP/IP networking. There are a million books and tons of sites online where you can learn for free. Learn about DNS, subnetting, IPv4 protocols, routing, gateways DHCP, VLANs, ect... That knowledge will be critical to ANY career in IT. For VMware again, you can get tons of free information online or even watch YouTube videos they have a ton of VMware How-To's. There are also books. I wouldn't recommend the VMware classes just yet. Get a solid understanding of networking and server operating systems. After that you can consider diving into one of the 5 day VMware classes that teach you the basics. This is costly training and most people get their jobs to pay for it. You must attend a VMware certified training class before you can get certified in VMware. That's a ways off for you right now. Best of luck! Keep at it. Tinker and tinker often, break stuff and figure out how to fix it. That's the best way I've learned!
If you take an image of the VM using something like Paragon you could (in theory) restore that image to a physical box. Paragon touts that it can restore images to dissimilar hardware which we ha... See more...
If you take an image of the VM using something like Paragon you could (in theory) restore that image to a physical box. Paragon touts that it can restore images to dissimilar hardware which we have tested and it does work. We haven't tried doing it to a VM.
What exactly does this person need to be able to do in vCenter to only one VM?
Have you looked at your storage infrastructure for any possible I/O bottlenecks?
If you can, reboot the host and see if the error continues. If the lights are still green on the drive then it hasn't failed 100% and may just be 'on its way out'. Pretty common. Contact your sup... See more...
If you can, reboot the host and see if the error continues. If the lights are still green on the drive then it hasn't failed 100% and may just be 'on its way out'. Pretty common. Contact your support vendor for a replacement drive.
Shutting down the host at 11PM is easy can be accomplished via PowerCLI and a scheduled task. Powering it back up however will require as others have said some sort of IMPI/ILO/IDRAC connection ... See more...
Shutting down the host at 11PM is easy can be accomplished via PowerCLI and a scheduled task. Powering it back up however will require as others have said some sort of IMPI/ILO/IDRAC connection used with DPM.
Our normal practice when we build any VM is to size it with the least amount of resources we think it will need to run. That way your chances of committing too much resources is less. You can alw... See more...
Our normal practice when we build any VM is to size it with the least amount of resources we think it will need to run. That way your chances of committing too much resources is less. You can always go back and edit the amount of RAM/CPU any given VM runs so its not that big of a deal. If you notice a machine using a lot of CPU or memory just bump it up. Our IIS servers are some of the least performance pigs we have. I'm confused why you want to take your IIS servers from Server 2008 down to 2003?? Should be going to 2012 not backwards IMHO.
Interesting question. I haven't passed USB drives to a VM but I would imagine that a snapshot and/or a clone of that VM would ignore the USB device because its being passed through. That's just a... See more...
Interesting question. I haven't passed USB drives to a VM but I would imagine that a snapshot and/or a clone of that VM would ignore the USB device because its being passed through. That's just a guess though.
We use Veeam for all of our virtual machines and its a breeze. People love Veeam for a few reasons, #1 you can read the entire install/admin manual in less than an hour and fully understand and u... See more...
We use Veeam for all of our virtual machines and its a breeze. People love Veeam for a few reasons, #1 you can read the entire install/admin manual in less than an hour and fully understand and use the entire product and #2 it actually works exactly as described. We use BEXEC for our physical servers. BEXEC is garbage and continues to get worse with every release. We only use BEXEC for data backups of physical machines. No disrespect but as a "consultant" you put yourself in a position to be a jack of all trades. Time to start learning all of them.
If you were able to successfully encrypt your ESXi installation that would do nothing for the VM's because they are stored on your shared storage. Usually total disk encryption is used for mobil... See more...
If you were able to successfully encrypt your ESXi installation that would do nothing for the VM's because they are stored on your shared storage. Usually total disk encryption is used for mobile devices and not servers. So are you trying to protect your servers from theft and subsequent unauthorized access? If so the point is moot if they steal your ESXi servers they would be useless to the thieves because again your VM's (and data) are on your SAN. So what is your endgame for encryption? What risk are you trying mitigate? 
Rubeck is right. You are trying to boot an ISO that isn't a bootable ISO.
What backup? Feel free to shower us with details....
Should work, and good catch on demoting the DC before you do a P2V. P2V of domain controllers especially on 2003 is a bad bad idea.
I've run every flavor of ESX and ESXi from 3.5 up to 5.5 and have never had any stability issues. As long as the hardware is on the HCL things usually go well. Maybe I've been lucky. I also agree... See more...
I've run every flavor of ESX and ESXi from 3.5 up to 5.5 and have never had any stability issues. As long as the hardware is on the HCL things usually go well. Maybe I've been lucky. I also agree with others saying check to see if your hardware vendor provides a customized ISO. That's your best bet to ensure compatibility.