x3850 X5 vs x3850 X6 comparison

Some of you might consider purchasing the Lenovo (formally IBM) System x servers. For the enterprise environments Lenovo offers x3850 X5 and x3850 X6 series. Since x3850 X5 will be discontinued from the market during this year, it makes sense to start considering x3850 X6. Such  type of server will… Continue reading

HotLink – manage all hypervisors from vCenter

Few weeks ago I did attend web meeting about “Extending VMware vCenter to Hybrid Cloud” with Oded Haner. It get my curiosity as it was promising something i did not believe is possible. Even after seeing the presentation I had doubts. I decided I have to see and touch it,… Continue reading

Corrupted Backups using CBT

alert

New issue was discovered which may result in corrupted backups leveraging vSphere CBT (Change Block Tracking) for incremental backups. Basically all backup products which use VMware API for Backups ( Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) )are affected. This issue occurs when you expand a virtual disk vmdk file which has… Continue reading

Sending vCenter Logs to Centralized Syslog Server using NXlog

Intro In my previous article called “Centralized syslog server for vSphere environment with CentOS 7 and rsyslog” I showed one of the ways how you can configure centralized Syslog server for vSphere environment. But in that article I covered only ESXi part. In this article I will describe how to send… Continue reading

Customized “embedded” version of ESXi need patching

VforVirtualist

IBM, HP, DELL are releasing its own customized “embedded” versions of ESXi which contain vendor specific drivers, opened firewall ports for their management solutions, etc. Patches are different for each ESXi version 5.0, 5.1, 5.5. I will show you how to download and implement those patches for IBM x3850 X5,… Continue reading

Centralized syslog server for vSphere environment with CentOS 7 and rsyslog

Couple of years ago we were asked to provide a working solution for centralized syslog collector. My customer had very tough security rules, and they were strictly against any appliance based, out of the box solution. They needed to have full control over the OS and applications installed. The main… Continue reading