Tim Phillips blog

In Scott Herold`s blog I found a very interesting article: How to remove FT from host without vCenter? Yes, I know, that it`s almost an unbelievable situation, but…

Let’s have a quick look at password policy in ESX Server:
esxcfg-auth –usepamqc=N1 N2 N3 N4 N5 match
where N1 is minimal length of password, which consists only of 1 class symbols (abcdef….)
where N2 is minimal length of password, which consists of 1 class symbols or 2 class symbols (ABCdef…)
where N3 is minimal amount of letters in password
where N4 is [...]

Everything is really simple! I need only 30 seconds to show it!
esxcfg-auth [ [ --enablead | --disablead ] [ --addomain= | --removedomain= ] [--addc= | --removedc= ] ]
where addomain|removedomain is name of domain, and  addc|removedc is DNS or IP address of domain controller. After that you need to create a user, who will be able to [...]

Today, in the 3d party of my “In a nutshell” story I`ll talk about VmWare High Availability: what it is, and how does it work.

Hi there! Today I`ll continue talking about disaster recovery functions, provided by VmWare, and I`d like to cover question of requirements and limitations of Fault Tolerance technology. As always, I`ll be terse and clear.

Hi there! Today I`d like to offer you an article about high availability technologies, provided by VmWare: vMotion, HA and FT. vMotion – the technology allows to transfer VMs from one physical server to another while it`s working (analog of Live Migration in Windows Server Hyper-V R2). Also need to mention that vMotion uses advantages of [...]

Today I would like to talk about difference in various types of vNIC in ESX 4. Need to note that this device have no physical analogues, and can be used only if VmWare Tools are installed. VMXNET – first generation, optimized for network performance between VMs.
VMXNET2 or Enhanced – simple VMXNET, but with few additional [...]

Hi there! Just for beginning pros and cons of using VmWare Server instead of ESXi Server:
Pros:

Server doesn`t require compatible hardware, and can be installed on any Windows or Linux host
ESXi doesn`t allow pass-through of USB drives to VM
Server`s VMs can be copied easily to USB stick and moved to other host
Doesn`t require additional learning.

Cons:

Requires too [...]

Hi there! Today I would like to tell you how to simply backup your VMs to a remote tape device. Let`s say we have  the following configuration: 192.168.1.100 – Windows Server with tape device, 192.168.1.200 – ESX host, 192.168.1.201 and .202 – Windows based VMs. In this configuration we do not have to work with ESX at all. [...]

Hi there! Sorry, got no time to write. Few days ago I got an idea about series of Versus articles. The first one is VmWare ESXi vs MS Hyper-V, and the second one will be iSCSI: hardware vs software.
All my thoughts about VmWare vs MS are available under cut. So,VmWare`s footprint – 100 Mb, while [...]

Few days ago Jack Fergeus from openBench Labs published a very interesting article on using Enterprise Server edition of Starwind Software`s iSCSI target.  I`ve used free version of this tool which had some limitations in a lab for a few months, but now I have deployed it on a real network, and this article was very useful [...]

While having a datacenter discussion with a client yesterday, I was reminded that it all starts with storage.  After thinking a bit more about that statement, it really made sense to me. Thinking back to various client planning sessions for various solutions, much of the requirements, bottlenecks, cost and sometimes mystery revolved around storage. Computer processing, memory and [...]

So, lets start. I`d like to start from the essentials: what possible kind of storage systems exist there, and what differences are between them, and, of course, I`ll talk about their advantages and disadvantages. I decided to offer not a detailed text description, but an image description of each technology.