four issues I encountered deploying vCenter and SRM 5.5 in a Windows environment

My Experience Deploying vCenter and Site Recovery Manager 5.5

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value. - Louis L’Amour

The virtualization community, like many others, exibits a very generous spirit of giving. The knowledge that we each possess, perhaps acquired through our own experiences, evolves as we circulate it with others.

After being virtually off the social grid for the past month, I decided to resume my activity by sharing some installation ‘gotchas’ that I encountered while deploying vCenter and Site Recovery Manager 5.5.

Please note: these solutions are all based on VMware KBs (noted below) and were tested against vCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager 5.5 running on Windows Server 2012, with SQL Server 2012 SP1 supporting databases.

Although relatively minor issues, I hope that you may found this useful and may avoid some of the same headaches that I encountered.

the DIY home VPN experiment (part three - my virtualized OpenVPN server)

Part Three: My Virtualized OpenVPN Server

Overview

In this post, I'd like to share my most recent home lab project - a nested OpenVPN server. I refer to it as nested, because it is running completely within my desktop computer. See the illustration below.

The idea for this project came along when I working on setting up a VPN with my older Linksys router. Basically, I wanted to come up with a way to run a home lab VPN server without requiring any additional hardware, and I wanted to incorporate virtualization into this project. In addition, running it as a VM allows for fairly safe and controlled experimentation, without running the risk of bricking one's router with non-standard firmware.

how to log-in to a fresh install of vCenter Server 5.5 using domain credentials (updated)

Updated: January 24, 2014.

I have read a few posts within the community lately [1][2] about an issue being encountered after a fresh install of vCenter 5.5. Basically, what happens is the only user that can log-in to the vCenter server is the SSO administrator (Administrator@vsphere.local). This may seem like unexpected behaviour, especially considering that even the account (perhaps an AD service account) that was used to perform the install is also unable to log-in and see the vCenter Server.

In contrast to the long title for this post, the solution that I would like to share is short and straight forward. I hope that this solution will save you from some post-install headaches.