A lot of you have been very busy this week, patching ESX hosts(That would be you Jason ) and hopefully reading all the excellent articles being aggregated on Planet V12n…

• Duncan Epping – CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior
  The above paragraph is a bit misleading , as it seems to imply that a
  VM has to access its full reservation. What it should really say is
  “Memory which is protected by a reservation will not be reclaimed by
  ballooning or Host-level swapping even if it becomes idle,” and
  “Physical machine memory will not be allocated to the VM until the VM
  accesses virtual RAM needing physical RAM backing.” Then that pRAM is
  protected by the reservation and won’t be reclaimed by ballooning or
  .vswp-file swapping. If there is any .vswp memory at all as no .vswp is
  created when the reservation is equal to the provisioned memory.
• Scott Lowe – PXE Booting VMware ESX 4.0
  Next, you’ll need the PXE boot files. Specifically, you’ll need the menu.c32 and pxelinux.0 files. These files are not on the DVD ISO image; you’ll have to download Syslinux from this web site. Once you download Syslinux, extract the files into a temporary directory. You’ll find menu.c32 in the com32/menu folder; you’ll find pxelinux.0 in the core folder. Copy both of these files, along with vmlinuz and initrd.img, into the root directory of the TFTP server. (If you don’t know the root directory of the TFTP server, double-check its configuration.)
• Stu Radnidge – Challenge Convention & Garbage In / Garbage Out & Engage Support Early & Engage Support Early
  The notion of GIGO is of course much older than I am, but it’s one of
  those concepts that is timeless. In relation to Cloud, it’s more
  pertinent than ever. The marketing hype would have you believe that
  Cloud is a panacea, and many people hawking their wares artfully dodge
  the subject of your existing tools and processes. But ignore these at
  your own peril. The COO of the company I work for has a great quote,
  which goes something like “God made the earth in 6 days, because he
  started with a clean slate.”. The same is true of internal Cloud (or
  whatever you want to call it – I’m going to call it that for the sake
  of convenience) – you could probably nail down the platform code and
  functionality that you want to launch with in a few weeks, but making
  the requisite changes to existing processes and integrating with
  existing tools in your environment is what will take the lion’s share
  of time to address.
• Luc Dekens – Counter the self-aware VUM
  Today there was quite a bit of activity on Twitter following Jason Boche’s blog post titled VMware Update Manager Becomes Self-Aware.
  The problem Jason discovered was that the VUM skipped the guests which are hosting the VUM server and the vCenter server. As a consequence you can not select a cluster, select “remediate” and go out for lunch anymore. The resolution was a rather cumbersome and error prone manual procedure.
  But of course PowerCLI can help the human vSphere administrator…
• Chris Wolf – RSA, Intel, and VMware Take a Big Step Forward in Cloud Security
  In the past, I have talked about this security dilemma in a couple of couple of key areas. First, we need a standardized set of cloud isolation levels. We also need standard metadata (either de facto or industry standard) so that third party audit tools can properly query an application’s relationship to cloud security policy in relation to virtual and physical controls that are in place. I covered those issues in more depth in the post “The Cloud Mystery Machine: Metadata Standards.” In addition, virtual resources need to be able to answer the question “Where are you?” That applies to both the runtime location and data location. It’s important to ensure that data privacy and governance concerns are met, and regulatory compliance issues such as data export restrictions are satisfied.

While running a Windows 7 virtual machine: · You are not able to use Windows XP Mode · The Microsoft Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool reports the error: This computer…

When you use ThinApp to capture Microsoft Excel 2007 on a system that has Microsoft Office 2003 in the native environment, you cannot send a workbook as an attachment from virtual…

This article provides instructions to create custom SSL certificates for VirtualCenter 2.x with OpenSSL and Microsoft…

This article provides steps to enable support for NetQueue on the Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller.   Note: NetQueue is enabled by default on ESX 4.0…

· Packet loss when using two service consoles · Intermittent packet loss with two service consoles · IP requests arrive at second service console IP but do not return because…

During the course of View Composer operations, linked clones are created, managed, and deleted by View Connection Server.   Under certain…

· Installing VMware Tools on a Windows guest fails · You see the error: The system administrator has set…

I cannot find the VMware Tools CD. Why didn’t I get this CD as part of my purchase? The installers for supported guest operating systems that have VMware Tools are packaged in VMware products as ISO image…