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Florian Grehl

vSphere 5.5 U2 C# Client can now edit Hardware Version 10 VMs

Slightly hidden in vSphere 5.5 Update 2 there is a new vSphere C# Client that can edit Virtual Machines running the latest Virtual Hardware (vmx-10). Instead of getting an error message when trying to edit Virtual Machines with Hardware Version 10 you can now reconfigure these machines with the legacy C# client. Understandably you can only edit pre-5.1 features. All 5.1/5.5 features are still only available with the vSphere Web Client.

With the vSphere Client you would usually see the following error message:

You-cannot-edit-vm-version-10

Read More »vSphere 5.5 U2 C# Client can now edit Hardware Version 10 VMs

Disable Virtual Machine Swap File (.vswp)

For each powered-on virtual machine, a .vswp file is placed in the virtual machines directory on the datastore. This file is required by VMkernel to swap virtual machine memory to the disk in case of excessive overprovisioning. The swap file size can be calculated with the formula (.vswp File = Allocated Memory - Memory Reservation). As per default, the reservation is set to 0, so the .vswp file size is equal to the amount of virtual memory.

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ESXi 5.5 affected by OpenSSL CVE-2014-0160 aka Heartbleed

[Last Update April 19, 2014 - Patches available]

There are a lot of news according to the recently published OpenSSL vulnerability. The bug, also known as "Heartbleed", allows attackers to steal informations that are protected by the SSL/TLS encryption.

Is VMware ESXi and the vCenter affected?
There is currently no official statement from VMware regarding this issue. After some research I found affected versions im VMware products. Here are my findings:

The affected versions are OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f.

Read More »ESXi 5.5 affected by OpenSSL CVE-2014-0160 aka Heartbleed

VMware VSAN License Calculator

VMware Virtual SAN and its pricing model is now available. The pricing model is very simple and, just like the model for the hypervisor, based on CPU sockets. There is no feature, capacity or scale limit. VSAN has to be licensed on top of the hypervisor and the whole cluster has to be licensed. This implies that you have to license each host in the cluster, even when it does not have any local disks and is only part of the cluster as a VSAN Agent. A more detailed description of VSAN licensing is available here.

I've created a VSAN License Calculator. Just enter the number of hosts and sockets per host in your cluster and it will calculate the total price of all required VMware products. It also includes a license cost breakdown which shows the price for each component separately.

vsan-vmware-virtual-san-box

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VMware Virtual SAN Licensing and Pricing

Last week, VMware has announced the general availability of VMware Virtual SAN. At a webcast event that was held a few days ago they did not release licensing and pricing information. Today VMware disclosed the secret: Virtual SAN is priced at $2,495 per CPU and at $50 per user for VDI deployments. Let's see how competitors at the Hyper-Converged market like Nutanix, Simplivity, Pivot3 or Scale Computing will react. vsan-vmware-virtual-san-box

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