As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.
Last year, my colleague asked me for advice. He couldn’t add an iSCSI target, provided by AWS Storage Gateway, on VMware ESXi cluster. So, initially, this material was intended to serve as a manual. However, since I got a similar question once more just recently, I realized that this topic could be interesting to the others as well, which is why I decided to share this guide, hoping it will be useful.
As an admin, I often have to deal with the necessity to transfer large OVF and ISO files or even move virtual machines (VMs) between ESXi hosts that have poor network performance or disposed in different locations with no network connection whatsoever.
Some time ago, I published articles on setting up a home lab using a PC running ESXi and Workstation. We all know that nested virtualization is not an ESXi-only feature; Microsoft Hyper-V also enables us to run VMs inside its VMs. Microsoft’s implementation of this technology is a bit different, but it exists. And, considering that VMware and Microsoft have been competing for a long time, it’s interesting to see what each has to offer for this type of virtualization. In this post, I examine how easy it is to configure a nested virtualization layer inside Hyper-V and vSphere VMs and discuss peculiarities of this process in both environments.
Once engineers came up with the way to virtualize graphics processing units (GPUs), the new era started for machine learning, gaming, modeling, and whatever else IOPS-hungry: all these applications can now go cloud! In this article, I’d like to take a closer look at why GPU virtualization is so promising, who pioneers this tech, and how VMware managed to cover the gap between the virtual and bare-metal GPUs.
It goes without saying that hard disk drives (HDDs) are one of the most common storage medium to date. Data centers, home labs, and PCs have them inside. No wonders, HDDs offer unmatched capacity for moderate costs per GB. Let’s take a closer look at how to choose an HDD. This article is going to be pretty much a long read, but there’s a flow chart in the end that helps to make your choice.
In this post, I’d like to discuss data consistency – an important thing when it comes to backups. If data is consistent, it can be used across your environment, so you can spin up applications faster after restoring from such backup. Actually, it’s why I think this topic to be so important even now.
This post will be pretty handy for those who rely on their memory too much because it discusses how to reset vCenter Server Appliance root password.
Some time ago, discussing how cool VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is, I briefly mentioned content libraries. That article was just an overview, so I decided not to go into details, saying that some features need their own posts. In today’s article, I’d like to share my hands-on experience with content libraries and help you to decide whether this feature can make your life any easier.
Admins shut down their hosts for servicing from time to time. After closing for maintenance one node, vSAN cluster resources are to be re-distributed, and here Maintenance Mode comes into play. Today, I’d like to discuss the whole idea of maintenance mode and its options.