This week, I was the guest on a new weekly virtualization podcast called This Week in Virtualization. In this episode, we talked about the next version of vSphere and its features - to be released at an unspecified date. You can watch on a webpage or you can subscribe to an iTunes RSS feed and watch in iTunes or on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. Click on the video below to bring up the webpage to watch:

Interested in Virtualization? Interested in Security? Then you need to listen to (and participate in) the virtualization security podcast. You can start right now by listening to archived podcasts (there was a great one this week) and put the next one on your calendar to make sure that you are able to watch it live. The TalkShoe URL is at: Virtualization Security Podcast

Brad Hedlund over at Internetwork Expert.org made a really amazing post about the Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V, and the Palo Adaptor. With UCS, there are a couple of network adapters designed just for virtualization. There is one for the blade UCS and one for the rack-mount UCS. These adapters allow the virtual machines to gain access to virtual fibre channel and virtual ethernet adaptors - amazing stuff!

Checkout this diagram from Brad’s post:

Read the full post at:  Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter

I was a guest on the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast this week where I covered my new vSphere Pro Series Volume 1 video. After that quick promo, VMware’s ESXi product management discussed the upcoming release of ESXi and what it will look like in the future. It was really amazing info! You can listen to it on the web, or subscribe to it in iTunes.

Here’s a graphic from the podcast:

List to the VMware Communities Roundtable here

I read a recent post on how to use PowerShell to create a large number of test virtual machines with sequential names. I can see this being so useful in testing and it’s really amazing what you can do with PowerShell!

Check out the full post at: Quick and Dirty PowerShell to create a large number of test VMs with sequential names

I enjoyed reading a recent post by DoubleCloud where they cover 3 Easy Ways Connecting to Your VM in Private Cloud. The 3 ways they discuss are:

1. Using VMware Remote Console which is a standalone application
2. Using browser plug-in to either IE or Firefox
3. Using Remote Desktop, VNC or SSH

Read the full article to find out how to do each of these three at: 3 Easy Ways Connecting to Your VM in Private Cloud

This week, VMware announced an acquisition of certain pieces of EMC management software to expand the VMware vCenter Management Product Family. By doing this, they “hope to address critical management needs as customers advance on journey to cloud computing.”

Basically, the pieces that they are purchasing are pieces of EMC’s Ionix. Here is a quote from the the Yahoo Finance Press Release:

Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will acquire all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager and will maintain engineering, marketing, sales and support operations in the United States, Europe, Israel, India and Australia. As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.

I was recently reading comment’s from EMC’s Virtualization Evangelist and Vice President, Chad Sakac from his blog post “Insider’s Perspective: Ionix and VMware“. In that post, Chad’s conclusion is this:

This is a move where VMware in an instant, makes a quantum increases the depth of resources, tools and capabilities in things that are focused on server-layer and up.   This expands the vCenter family of management capabilities, and the teams that develop them, and the teams take them to market.

This is a move where EMC, in an instant, can focus ongoing management M&A and R&D and go to market on the things that focus on UCS, networks, and storage - the server layer and down.  This accelerates EMC’s management efforts.

Hi post explains each of the different technologies acquired, what they do and how they will help VMware. I encourage you to check it out.

In this VMware KB article # 1007329, they cover how to redirect ESXi system logs to a central syslog server. This is the recommended procedure for ESXi and a great idea. Here is what the basic steps are:

But I encourage you to read the full article at: How to redirect ESXi system logs to a central syslog server

What happens if your Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM (virtual supervisor module) gets orphaned? Jason Nash over at Varrow Blogs posted this article that tells you what to do, step by step. Jason says that the key to this is an XML “extension key”. Read the full post at: How to Recover an Orphaned Nexus 1000V Switch

The guys over at Virtual Insanity.com (Scott Sauer and Aaron Sweemer) have a cool new post called “Who’s Spying on me in Virtual Center?”. In this post, they cover how to see who else is watching you as you use a virtual machine console. You can do this both in vCenter / vSphere Client as well as with PowerCLI.

Read the full post at: Who’s Spying on me in Virtual Center?