vROPS 7.0 SDDC Health Monitoring Solution Management Pack 5.0 – Support for NSX 6.4.1?

October 15, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

This is just a quick post to show that vROPS 7.0 and the SDDC Health Monitoring Solution 5.0 Management Pack for vROPS, is able to monitor NSX for vSphere 6.4.1 despite the fact that NSX 6.4.1 is not officially supported in combination with the SDDC Management Pack 5.0.  Of course the best way forward is to upgrade NSX to a supported version. The following list contains the supported VMware products and the supported versions of those products for the SDDC Health Monitoring Solution Management Pack 5.0. VMware vCenter Server 6.0 U1/U2/U3 latest patch, 6.5.x, and 6.7 VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.8, 6.2.9, 6.3.5, 6.3.6, 6.4.2, and 6.4.3 VMware vRealize Automation 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 VMware vRealize Operations Manager 7.0 VMware […]

vExpert PRO

October 10, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

Back in February I did send an email to Corey telling him that I didn’t understand that there were only a handful of vExperts in Belgium, a country similarly sized to the Netherlands, and that I wanted to encourage the program in Belgium and grow the numbers of vExperts. Hey Corey, Hopefully you are doing well and not too swamped with assessing all the VEXPERT applications. For the last couple of years I have been literally stunned by the underwhelming amount of VEXPERTS in Belgium. There are exactly 10. As a comparison: there are about 70 in the Netherlands, a similarly sized and populated country. So what is going on over here in Belgium? I have been thinking about how to increase the number […]

VSAN 6.7 U1 – What’s new?

August 27, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

Like most of us, I too have been counting down to VMworld and the big announcements it brings each year and because I have taken a keen interest into vSAN, I have been mostly wondering which announcements would be made about vSAN.  So let’s skip to what is most important to me: What is new with vSAN? By now you might have heard rumors about a new version of vSAN, and it is true ladies and gentlemen,  vSAN 6.7 Update 1 is almost upon us. A little voice told me it should be released in the 3th quarter of the year. Hybrid cloud integration. VMware realizes the importance for companies to be able to go to the cloud, to be […]

VEXPERT: Increasing the number of vExperts in Belgium and Luxembourg

June 5, 2018 Kim Bottu 3

 An excellent idea “Yes, that is an excellent idea!” was Tom’s reply when I asked him if he would mind if I would try to encourage more people to join the vExpert program in Belgium. Probably you don’t know, but there are only 14 VEXPERTS in BeLux (Belgium and Luxembourg combined). Not a big number. It is shocking that a similarly sized country such as the Netherlands manages to have 92 vExperts compared to 14 in BeLux!  We are convinced that the vExpert presence in Belgium and Luxembourg might increase if only people would see what the program can do for them and how good the vCommunity is to its family members. My small idea about encouraging the vExpert program […]

How attending VMworld changed my professional life and can change yours too!

June 3, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

It’s been six years since I attended VMworld for the very first time. Up until my very first VMworld I never had attended any vendor conference and here I was on the plane on route to Barcelona. As soon as I got off the plane and out of the airport, I immediately got smacked in the face with a heatwave. My first planning mistake became very clear as soon as I entered my hotel room: crappy air conditioning. Not really what you desire for when it is blistering hot outside. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be my only planning mistake. Ahead of the conference I had made a list of all the sessions I wanted to attend to and all the guided labs […]

Testing VSAN 6.7 network outages on Ravello is easy!

May 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up a new virtual VSAN lab on Ravello and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, aka.: OCI. There is not better time to get things done than the present, especially since vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7 have been released earlier in the month. First: a big thank you to Ian Sanderson and Raff Poltronieri for posting to get vSphere 6.7 to work on Ravello / Oracle OCI. You can read about that right here. However, I was not really pleased with the network setup on my hosts. For starters, all my interfaces had been put on the same network, both the MGMT vmnics and the VSAN vmnics. I decided to change this. Starting today, […]

RAVELLO: Troubleshooting VSAN Network connectivity issues

March 28, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

Yesterday night, I was setting up a new VSAN cluster on Ravello and got hit with a network issue: Apparently my network was partitioned!   The network for all hosts has been setup similarly on all hosts, so the network partition issue didn’t make much sense. MGMT Kernel: MGMT and vMotion traffic vmk0 10.1.0.1x VSAN Kernel: VSAN traffic vmk1 10.1.0.2x Unfortunately esxi004.vmusketeers.local had been added to a separate partition! Rather than checking each host separately, I used the VSAN PowerCLI commands to figure out if my hosts were properly configured for VSAN networking. PS C:\Windows\system32> $vsanhealth.networkhealth HostResult : {VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl} HostCommunicationFailure : HostDisconnected : HostInEsxMaintenanceMode : HostInVsanMaintenanceMode : HostWithVsanDisabled : IssueFound : True LargePingTestSuccess : False MatchingIPSubnets : True MatchingMulticastConfig […]

VCAP6-DESIGN compute calculation

March 26, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

A few weeks ago Bilal pinged me a message and asked me if I could quickly calculate the resources for an attached VCAP compute resource question. After solving the question he told me that I had created this question on our VCAP-Design sim about a year ago and that most people get the answer wrong. So what is happening here and more importantly: why? The reason why most people are unable to solve this question is because of what is assumed and hasn’t been explicitely mentioned: overhead. I always treat overhead as a mandatory input: Workloads should be able to run without contention and there should be enough free resources to run ESXi and its tasks at all times. Unfortunately a lot of people who […]