One of my resolutions for 2013 is to write and post articles more frequently. Here's my first attempt.
At my company we are heavy users of VMware/ESX/ESXi. It's what we have used for well over 8 years. One of the reasons why: it just works, it's stable, and (as it related to this post) the virtual networking is just simpler (in my opinion).
We use Citrix Netscalers for web application security and acceleration. In order to test some things before a deployment of some new Netscalers we wanted to test then using Citrix's Netscaler VPX virtual appliance (http://www.citrix.com/netscalerVPX).
Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.
After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925
I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.
[UPDATE]: Read the updated article here
So VMware Server 2.x on Fedora 11 has been driving me nuts. I recently re-imaged my workstation and decided to ditch VMware Server and give Linux qemu-kvm a try since it is now the default hypervisor in Fedora and will be the standard hypervisor going forward in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (http://www.redhat.com/rhel).
We are an almost exclusively Windows shop so we use Windows DHCP servers and Windows Deployment Services (WDS/RIS) server to image all of our workstations and servers via PXE booting. If we were using an ISC dhcpd server things would probably have been a lot easier. Below I describe how I get things (partially) working.
There are a lot of postings out on the Net about performance tuning VMware products to run more efficiently. I'd thought I'd share some that I thought were farily useful (most related to running VMware Server on a Linux host).
