I just got back from the VMunderground VMworld 2010 Warm Up Party at the Thirsty Bear Brewing Co. and I must say that they definitely did open a can of W.U.P.a.a.S. While I was unable to secure a T-shirt due to not having an official invitation, I was able to secure a walk-in ticket and enjoy the party. The place was packed as I had expected and it really was a great networking opportunity. It was also a way to get some free stuff both at the party an afterwards (not going to give away the secrets). I would highly recommend checking this out in the future if you have not yet. I cannot wait for what VMworld 2010 will hold!

For one of the group projects I am currently working on, we are in the process of ordering hardware for a VMware deployment. The other day I was asked by one of the hardware engineers for a standard BIOS configuration to be applied to all newly ordered systems. The question was directed at me because I am the VMware Subject Matter Expert (SME). This reminded me how difficult it is to determine the best practices on configuring a BIOS for a VMware environment. Searching the Internet, I found multiple attempts over the years to put together a VMware optimized list, but the list was never maintained. In addition, I found that most BIOS Optimization Guides (BOGs) were vendor specific. Finally, I was unable to find a BOG specific to ESX(i) and as many of you know a properly configured BIOS can make all the difference.

As such, I decided it would be a good idea to put together a VMware BIOS Optimization Guide or vBOG. While every BIOS is different, I hope to put together a comprehensive guide over time that will be continually maintained. My goal is not to explain every BIOS option, but to highlight all the VMware specific and important ones. I expect this topic to be controversial and I welcome any feedback. I will attempt to provide supporting documentation on all recommendations I provide. Please be advised that I am in no way a hardware expert. These recommendations come primarily from online research and general practice. In the future, I hope to add actually benchmarks into the guide to reforce the recommendations made.

Over a year and a half later than I hoped to take the exam, I finally did and I passed! The main reasons for the delay was because of the VMware requirement of taking at least one VMware class prior to the exam and the decision to change jobs back in December of 2009. I have to admit, while I feel extremely comfortable using VMware datacenter products like ESX(i) and vCenter Server, the exam was much harder than I expected. The questions, while fair, were not what I expected or considered important to know. In addition, all the mock exams I found online were of little or no assistance for the real test. My advice for anyone preparing to take the exam is to make sure you read the configuration maximums and installation guides at a minimum. Ideally, I would recommend reading most of the white papers including ones about networking and storage. Finally, be sure to study things that are outside of your comfort zone and outside of the core datacenter components like ESX(i) and vCenter Server such as VMware Guided Consolidation, VMware Host Update Utility, vCenter Orchestrator, vCenter Converter, VMware Data Recovery, VMware vShield zones, VMware Fault Tolerance, etc.

Following Scott Lowe's lead, here is my VMworld 2010 Schedule:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

My goal is to focus primarily on cloud and best practices.

So I installed a Windows XP VM the other day with a corporate ISO file. The initial login screen showed the administrator account and another corporate specific account. I logged in as administrator and applied the latest patches. Upon rebooting the system, only the corporate specific account was available. I was unable to find a way to log in as administrator and I did not know the password for the corporate specific account.

How could I log in as administrator?