January 25, 2019 Software

ESXi 6.7 Quick Boot in a nutshell. How fast can you actually reboot ESXi?

Quick Boot is another cool feature introduced in vSphere 6.7. Why does it deserve own article? Because, with this feature in place, rebooting ESXi won’t lead to restarting a server itself. By optimizing the reboot path, Quick Boot enables to avoid time-consuming firmware and device initialization processes. Looks really handy when all you need is just applying small changes or doing some update quickly, doesn’t it? In this article, I discuss how to quick boot a server and share my experience of using that feature. How fast will ESXi reboot with that feature in place?

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January 17, 2019 Software

VMware brought PMEM support to vSphere. How fast can your vSphere 6.7 VM potentially run on PMEM?

Some time ago, there was a post about new cool features brought to VMware vSphere 6.7 with Update 1. I forgot to mention one thing that appeared in VMware vSphere even before the update – PMEM support for your VMs. Well, I think it won’t be enough to write something like “Wow, it is good to see PMEM support in vSphere… it is very fast”. This innovation needs own article shedding light on what PMEM is and how fast your VMs can actually run on it. Unfortunately, I have no NVDIMM devices in my lab yet… but I still can simulate one using some host RAM!

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January 11, 2019 Software

How to build a home lab using your PC. Part 2: VMware Workstation

Building a virtualized environment with VMware Workstation is a bit different from the scenario discussed before. Today, I use VMware Workstation 15 Pro – a virtualization platform that supports hypervisor virtualization and allows administrating small VMware infrastructures. Yes, Workstation is a vCenter-like platform, but it has rather limited functionality. Anyway, it allows building a vSphere lab for free! This being said, the solution is good for this article.

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December 24, 2018 Hardware

How to build a home lab using your PC. Part 1: ESXi 6.7 U1

While writing my previous article, I remembered the days when I was only building my first lab. It was a bit tough, you know, as vSphere yet was a black box for me. Those thoughts brought me to the idea of writing this article. The article in which I share my know-how of building a minimalistic lab using… only a PC, switch, and laptop. I’ve divided this topic into 2 parts as I am unsure whether you guys like long-reads. In this part, I discuss how to build an ESXi environment using PC and ESXi 6.7 U1. The next article addresses creating a lab using PC and VMware Workstation 15 Pro. I hope that both of them will be really handy for you!

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December 13, 2018 Software

What’s new in VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1? Let’s look under the hood

Some time ago, VMware released VMware vSphere 6.7 U1. You know, I am really happy to, finally, find some time to take a thorough look at it. vSphere 6.7 U1 is the most up-to-date version of this virtualization platform so far, thus it is good to know its new features to predict what to expect of the upcoming versions. Well, I guess that this article is kinda of a long read. Honestly, I could not make it shorter as I wanted it to provide the entire picture of changes that were brought to vSphere 6.7 platform with U1. I hope you like it.

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November 29, 2018 Software

ESXi is free… but, why do you buy ESXi anyway?

ESXi is often told to be a free hypervisor. I’ve mentioned in my previous post that there are actually two free ESXi versions: Evaluation and Free. The thing is, both have several limitations that make them unfit for production use. The former has a 60-day time limit, but it provides all the ESXi features. The latter, in its turn, has no time limits, but it lacks many cool hypervisor features. With all that being said, it becomes clear why you just buy from VMware at some point even though you are potentially good to go with any of those free licenses.

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November 5, 2018 Software

Installing VMware Tools in different environments

VMware Tools is a handy utility suite that makes your VMs run faster and dramatically simplifies their management on the whole. And, the nice thing is, it installs fairly easy on your VMware VMs regardless of their guest OS. Today, I’m going to talk about VMware Tools in general and how to install the package in different environments.

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October 12, 2018 Software

Starting with VMware? 6 things beginners should know

If you are new to VMware or just starting out in the tech, you may feel a bit confused about products naming. Well, at least I was. There are tons of products in the suite so many have a hard time grasping how all those things come together. For instance, it may be hard for a beginner to tell apart ESXi and vSphere. What should you do? Well, nothing special, you know. Google. Ask fellow admins. Look through forums. Read books. Well, my post is not here to bring you from the very beginning to finish.

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