VMware HA

HA stands for one of the critical enterprise cluster feature of VMware called “High Availability”. It can be configured on a VMware cluster to auto recover VM’s from a ESX host failure. When you configure HA via vCenter Server on VMware cluster, it installs Automated Availability Manager (AAM)  (VMware HA agent) on individual ESX host The HA agent (AAM) runs a heartbeat mechanism on each host in a cluster to signal that the host is running and is a part of the cluster. g gf

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KickStart automated ESX install

Extract the ESX media from the bootable ISO/DVD received from VMware Copy them to a network location and make them accessible Create the ks.cfg (kickstart configuration file) answer file with custom values to installation options. The main sections of the ks.cfg file are as below accepteula or vmaccepteula (required) autopart (required) clearpart (optional) dryrun (optional) install (required) keyboard (optional) serialnum or vmserialnum (optional) network (optional) paranoid (optional) part or partition (optional) rootpw (required) %include or include %pre (optional) %post (optional) %firstboot The previous version to 4.0 of ESX server used to support incomplete ks.cfg file by which it uses the […]

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Processors and Virtualization

Today’s all enterprise Virtualization platforms requires servers with 64bit x86 processors what exactly that mean is those are the x86 processors whose instruction set is extended. The hardware industry calls it as x86-64.  Refer to x86-64 article for more details.      

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