Visio Stencils For VMware, Hyper V, etc!

There are a couple of great websites that have a large collection of Visio stencils. When you’re in need of something more than the basic set of stencils that is included with Visio then look no further!

Veeam provides a free collection of VMware and Hyper-V virtualization Visio stencils that can be used by ESX administrators, system integrators and datacenter managers to create their own diagrams in Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007, 2010 or 2013 as part of your Hyper-V or VMware deployment planning.

Download the Veeam VMware and Hyper-V stencils direct from Veeam here:

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-stencils.html

There are also tons of vendor specific visio stencils on VisioCafe. VisioCafe is an independent non-profit web site for the gathering together of IT industry Visio collections:

http://www.visiocafe.com

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End of General Support for vSphere 4.x

This is just a friendly heads up for anyone who may still have VMware vSphere 4.x (ESX, ESXi, and vCenter 4.x) in their environment.

We have quickly approached the end of vSphere 4.x General Support phase on May 21st, 2014. This means that there will be no more maintenance updates / upgrades, security patches, bug fixes, new hardware support, or server / client / guest OS updates. This support is only provided during the General Support Phase which begins on the date of general availability of a Major Release (“GA”) and lasts for a fixed duration (typically 5 years).

Support will still be available through the 2-year Technical Guidance Phase but it’s limited to providing existing security patches, bug fixes, and workarounds for non-business critical issues. Be aware that there is no phone support for a product that has reached the Technical Guidance phase of its lifecycle.

vmware4EOL

SSD Emulated Virtual Disks for Nested ESXi

I came across a gotcha scenario when trying to deploy vSAN in my home lab. When adding disks to the nested ESXi server all of the disks are detected as regular ol’ spindle disks regardless of the actual underlying storage. So I was in need of a method to emulate an SSD device. Truth be told there are actually many other reasons why you might want to emulate a SSD disk.

The solution is easy! It’s just one simple edit to the virtual machine’s configuration file (VMX). As long as you’re running virtual machine hardware version 8 or later you can configure a specific virtual disk to appear as an SSD.

scsiX:Y.virtualSSD = 1

X represents the controller ID and Y is the disk ID of the virtual disk.