Bilal Ahmed, Author at

Dell Compellent 5020 Commissioning

March 7, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So where I am working currently they are a heavy Compellent shop. Let me give you some of the back story We have multiple SC8000s spread across 2 sites. These were specced up years ago (before my time), and are now reaching EOL. One SC8000 was reaching EOL and no one let the company know, which was a big slip up by Dell. Because the original SC8000 was an upgrade from the old White box controllers Comepllent used to use, all the disks and enclosures carried over. But the issue was that these were THAT old, that support was falling off for them, and that meant that a good chunk on the disks on that SAN were now going EOL. […]

ESXi PSOD #Homelab #vExpert #ESXi

February 18, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I booted up my HP Z600, this houses my main management VMs and ESXi runs off a usb stick. So nothing fancy. On boot up I got this lovely screen of joy: I don’t like PSODs they make me sad. Looking at the error and the fact that it was happening at boot up made me think of some USB drive issue. Let’s think about it for a minute, when ESXi is loaded off a USB/SD card it will then run in memory, and if you make a change it will save it to the drive or it will save automatically every hour (KB ). One thing you have to remember is to make sure you configure the advance […]

Some Basic #PowerCLI using foreach to modify #NTP and do #ESXi host backups #vExpert

February 6, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

You will have seen my earlier post about learning PowerShell, and now I am using what I think is one of the best things about PowerShell……The foreach loop. I have seen it used many times, and never fully understood it, I kind of got what it did, but now I am getting it into my head and I have been using it to try and various things. So I have been doing more bits in PowerCLI to help improve my scripting skills and just to see if I can make my life easier. Modifying NTP settings on multiple ESXi hosts There is a known bug in PowerCLI 10 where Remove-VMHostNtpServer looks like it has worked, but does not actually do […]

Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Third Edition #BookReview #Powershell #PowerCLI #Scripting #vExpert

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So if you follow my posts, one thing you will know about me is that I like learning new things and picking up skills. Through my whole time of working with vSphere, I have used PowerCLI in one way or another. I can muddle my way around a bit, but it has always niggled at me that I don’t know it as well as I could. When people were talking about scripting or sharing their scripts, I could barely follow along, and that to me is very annoying. I always at least want to have a solid base understanding. So I finally got around to buying this book and using it. Whenever you ask around about learning PowerShell, EVERYBODY and I […]

Moving from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 Part 2 #Upgrade #Migration #Fresh #vExpert #vSphere #VCSA

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have got all the back story out of the way with Part 1, we can get into the meat of it all. The Middle I used various scripts, from various places and used the web client to get everything how I needed it to be. These scripts are provided AS IS, use them at your own risk, they worked for me. I have credited everyone I borrowed the source scripts from, and even provided the location of the source scripts too. A lot of people put effort into making the scripts, so I thought it would only be fair people knew where they came from. I made edits and adjusted as I needed to get the job […]

Moving from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 Part 1 #Upgrade #Migration #Fresh #vExpert #vSphere #VCSA

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been meaning to write a post on this for a while, so I thought I better get started! So let me tell you a story! The Beginning Now as we all know vSphere 5.5 went EOL a little while ago. So in preparation, I was investigating the various options that were available for the business, to keep them supported. When I first joined the business years ago. it was all a vSphere 5.1 environment that didn’t get patched often and hosts had very very long uptimes. the reason I was brought on board was to get a handle on this and bring it all into line. One of the first jobs was to actually re-ip the whole environment […]

VMworld Barcelona 2018 #Hackathon H4CK 4 C3N73R #RussianRoulette @kmruddy @vmwarecode @VirtualG_UK @Dark_KnightUK

November 17, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the pleasure of attending the hackathon at VMworld and meeting @kmruddy and the mighty beard! So I was asked to join up with Graham Barker @VirtualG_UK and David Taylor (WHO DOES NOT HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT) David how can you be a guy that travels around the world for Dell EMC on projects and not even have a Twitter account, you should be ashamed of yourself! They had an idea, that to me was super interesting. They were using VMware Workstation 15 with the new REST API bits, along with PowerCLI to create a quiz. After discussing the idea with them, I came up with the idea of it being called Russian Roulette. In VMware Workstation there was a […]

Cisco CyberOps CCNA #CyberOps #CCNA #Security #CyberSecurity

October 25, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now that I have completed and passed this new CCNA. I thought I would write up a blog post about the whole process. Over the last couple of years, Cisco was giving away free online scholarships for this new certification they were releasing. They provided you with the online materials and gave you a voucher to sit each exam twice for free once you had completed all the relevant online coursework. I had postponed it multiple times due to various other things (VCDX/Linux training etc). This was the final run, if I didn’t do it now there was no opportunity to do it again, so I thought why not I have nothing to lose and a lot to gain! […]