It was well over a year after HP announced their Gen 9 ProLiant line that we began using the new platform to build out VMware hosts. We wanted to leverage the latest v3 Xeon processors for our heaviest hitting and most critical workloads. When… Continue Reading
The vCenter Database (VCDB) is a lean, mean, data collection machine and it’s what makes your vCenter YOUR vCenter. The VCDB stores things like events, statistics, licensing, and configuration information for your environment. Under normal conditions your VCDB should… Continue Reading
Chrome 45 sounds a bit like a weapon, and if you’re an NPAPI based plugin consider yourself shot. Earlier this month, version 45 was released which killed off all support for NPAPI plugins including the VMware Client Integration Plugin for vCenter… Continue Reading
Performance overview charts are important to any vSphere admin’s life. I often use these as a starting point to troubleshoot contention issues, utilizing advanced charts after consulting the overview. It wasn’t long after upgrading our Windows vCenter server from 5.5 to 6.0… Continue Reading
Aw, snap! Chrome is at it again and finding new ways to break the spirits of vSphere Web Client users. If you remember, Chrome 42 shipped with NPAPI plugin support disabled which was a nuisance. Now, Chrome 43 won’t even load the… Continue Reading
Update provided below! Google has been threatening to remove NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) support for some time now and they’ve tested the waters with version 42 by disabling it. Since the VMware Client Integration Plugin requires NPAPI, administrators now… Continue Reading
Have you ever seen a datastore that’s larger than its underlying LUN? Recently, we’ve been working with another team of administrators to migrate some critical applications to VMware. Because of the unique storage requirements around one application, we’ve ended up with many datastores to… Continue Reading
It’s patch week again which means many guest reboots in our VMware environment. Lately, we’ve been receiving alerts on many of our Server 2012 VM’s, and upon investigating we’ve found these guests to be hung at the Windows boot screen. After a… Continue Reading
We haven’t had our HP BL460c Gen8’s with the new Xeon E5-2697 v2 12 core processors long. Last week we started to get e-mails from the help desk that users were complaining about sluggish performance in Citrix. Oddly, all of the… Continue Reading
Hyper-V was an only child in our environment until a few large outages caught the eye of management and end users. A fellow admin and I pitched the perfect solution. Sure, VMware will cost you more, but you are buying rock solid stability. Besides, neither… Continue Reading