This is just a very little tip for today: fill your blade chassis vertical, instead of horizontal. Here is a little illustration:

No sorry, there is no plug-in for Synology to download patches (would be cool though - anyone?). However, I've been fiddling around with vSphere UMDS and wanted to have the patches downloaded to my Synology NAS box. And through the Synology webservices act as a patch store - AND IT WORKS :-).

Triggered by @esloof his post on Freesco 0.4.3, I wanted to create such router into a VM, but for version 0.4.4. I also wanted to move it to a virtual disk so I could make an OVF and do multiple deploys. While trying to get this to work after a few hours, I finally found a really fast and reliable method to do it myself in like 10 minutes (and so can you after reading this manual).

I was rebuilding my homelab and wanted to create 'sites' using vlans. I am using the HP Procurve 1810G-24 switch (cheap, works great) but I had to fiddle some things out and I got it now. I know other sites have nice tutorials, but this is a quick recap from me.

Hi all. Today (17-4-2012) William Lam provided a method to prevent HBA drivers to be loaded during installation and upgrades. This makes the removevmhba script obsolete. Since I got asked quite often wetter this would be possible for ESXi, I couldn't answer. However, check out this post, since that would be the current solution right now. I have updated the download description accordingly.

I got a question from @repping yesterday which got me thinking. His question was: "Do you know a good site where I can find memory prices for enterprise hardware.". Later it became clear he wanted to use that price to calculate chargeback for memory. He wanted to know the amount/GB. My fist reaction was: well, looking at the total amount of memory in combination with certain size DIMMs - the price rises with larger and larger DIMMs.

I think Dell uses a quite transparent site, with reasonable prices. Let's take a typical server, an R720 which can hold 2 XEONs and hold 24 DIMMs. Here is a table with the current price at time of writing this post:

Mr. @esloof did a nice tweet about this one and caught my attention. It's a very nice diagram in pdf format showing the memory management for vSphere 5. The thing I like best is the way it is set up: screenshot from esxtop, vSphere client and very clear mapping of virtual memory into physical memory. I'm printing it on A2 and stick it onto a wall and look at it from time to time. I suggest you do the same . Check it out here.

This post is just a reminder for me - however, there might be a thing or two for you to pick up too...

I received a link to this: VMware Technical Journal. Also @duncanyb also blogged about this one already. However, I want to stress how cool this document actually is!

I got this nice question from my colleague last week:

We have cloned a VM, but I want to prevent the original from being started. Also when we do a failover to an other datacenter - I do not wan't this VM to be started.

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Hi all,

I've just updated my complete site. I wasn't really happy with the whole template so it was time for me to update it. I also updated the BLOG section, filtered out relevant articles and upgraded the joomla back-end to the latest version. Overall, I'm very satisfied.

Last Friday I was at the DutchVMUG in the NBC Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. The DutchVMUG is a large (700+) VMware Usergroup event. During this event you'll get great speakers in 4 parallel sessions, the ability to do workshops, visit awesome sponsors and meet peers in the industry. My experiences were just plain awesome. I had a GREAT day. I was invited to do a presentation and since I was involved in implementing and maintaining a large VMware View environment I thought: "Why not share my knowledge to the community?". So I created a little presentation in Prezi, my favorite presentation tool and called it: VMware View in the Enterprise. But, first things first...