For those of you unaware VMware recently released the VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist What does it do? “VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.

Problem Fairly recently I came across this error message on one of my hosts “esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full” Fallout While trying to address the issue I had the following problems when the ramdisk did indeed “fill up” PSOD (worst case happened only once in my experience) VM’s struggling to vMotion from the affected host when putting into maintenance mode. Temporary workaround A reboot of the host would clear the problem (clear out the ramdisk) for a short while but the problem will return if not addressed properly.

Just a quick post on something that was not immediately obvious when it happened to me. When deploying vCSA 5.5 and trying to add it to the domain, I was presented with the following error. I immediately did all the all the usual checks, making sure it had a static IP and correct DNS servers etc.. The one thing missing however was a FQDN for the hostname (in the network tab).

So what is VMUG? The VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, global, customer-led organization, created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events. Presently there are five VMUGs in the UK including the latest addition - South West UK VMUG - @swukvmug Why am I involved and why should you come along? I had been using VMware products for over 3 years and after joining twitter it was very clear to me the VMware user community was very friendly and also very helpful, it was there I learned about VMUG so the chance to meet and greet other users like myself and of course learn from the “rockstars” was to good an opportunity to pass up, after attending several meetings I was completely sold.

So this morning I took the VMware Infrastructure as a Service exam (VCPVCD510) to gain the VCP5-Cloud qualification. The IaaS exam is available for existing VCP5-DCV holders to take without any other pre-requisites. I am very pleased to say I finished the exam in good time and scored 466/500 – the pass mark is 300. The Exam The exam itself is 85 multiple choice questions, and gives you 90 minutes to do them.

As a proof of concept I recently tried to virtualize OS X (Mountain Lion) - It is important to note that VMware is now licensed to do so and you can read more here. The following is an overview of the steps I followed to achieve my goal in some cases it was trial an error as I am not a regular Mac user. The Hardware As OS X requires Apple hardware to run you will have to find yourself a Mac that will install and run ESXi.

According to VMware, Infrastructure Navigator is …a component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. It automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources. Effectively it takes a look at the network connections that are running between your VMs (and physical servers) and works out which applications and services are running on each, and the dependencies – both upstream and downstream – for each VM.

There’s no doubt that vCOps is a great product for proactively monitoring your vSphere environment, but it’s a hefty package for the lab. The minimum recommended RAM is a whopping 16GB – in my lab that’s the whole of my management host! I recently needed to do some testing so I wanted to get it running in the lab with the barest minimum I could get working, and it turns out you can get working with just 4GB and 2 CPU…albeit you wouldn’t want to monitor much!

After attending the “Future of IT” Google hangout in September, I was asked to give a quick summary on what 2014 may hold. So without further ado.. I believe in 2014, we will see an increased demand for - and usage of - hybrid clouds, especially among SMEs who are trying to avoid large investment on private clouds to accommodate high demand, short term projects. End user computing will play an ever larger role, with BYOD becoming even more viable for businesses, including those with strict data controlled environments.

2013 has been an amazing year for me – I was awarded the vExpert title, I’ve taken and passed my VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD and spoken at the London and UK national VMUGs. I’ve attended my first VMworld and spent countless hours in the lab and on study, generating about 30 blog posts. All I can say is that it’s been a truly blessed year. After two and a half years working as a Senior Infrastructure Analyst for a global insurance company, the time has come for a change!