ESXi

Home lab setup, part 1

May 31, 2019 Kim Bottu 2

Ah, we all do love our home labs and there are some pretty impressive ones out there. But for my own needs, I can run almost everything nested, so I saw no need to invest “that much” money. Currently my home lab exists out of a single Supermicro E300 9D 8CN8TP node. Hardware Some people have asked me how I have set it up. So here is a small blog post about my current setup. Hardware:– 1 x Supermicro SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP– 1 x Sandisk Ultrafit 32GB USB 3.0– 1 x Samsung PM883 240 GB SATA 2.5″ 1.3DWPD– 1 x Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB NVMe M2 80mm – 2 x Crucial 64 GB ECC DDR4-2666 LR-DIMM, ECCI do have a second […]

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 […]

Storage vMotion Thin to Thick Lazy Scripting #vExpert #PowerCLI #PowerShell #vSphere

August 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 1

Well hello, there party people! I recently came across an issue where the customer had just configured alerting to look for Thin Provisioned VMs, and to my and their dismay it came back with over 300 VMs across 2 sites in staging and production that were like this. Now they have Dell Compellent SANs and these Thin Provision at the storage layer too, so it was basically thin on thin! Now the key points here were: Let’s figure out why this happened Let’s fix the issue for the currently deployed VMs and for future deployments Now we did some digging and it appears the Devs and their automation scripting were the cause of the issue. In their scripts, they had it […]

VCSA 6.5 AD Lookup Issues #DNS #DIG #VMware #vExpert #VCSA #vCenter

April 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, I have been deploying a new 6.5 VCSA as part of my plan to move away from the current 5.5 deployments I am working with (a post for another time). During testing of this new deployment, I had a user come to me with a strange error. When they changed their AD password, they lost all access to the VCSA, but everything else for them worked fine, they could log in to anything else using their AD account. I could log into the VCSA fine and other users could still log in fine too. We cleared the web cache among other things, but to no joy. I couldn’t really see anything that was wrong. A few web posts mentioned that […]

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Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

Bitdefender – True Agentless protection

June 13, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Last week I was in London at the InfoSecurity convention having a look what is happening in the security world. If you have never attended InfoSecurity, it is a free event where most of the presentations are a bit loaded on the marketing side.  Of course there are always exceptions. The 2-hour workshops are truly gems. At least the workshops which I did attend to. What if you could protect VM’s without agents or without any other piece of installed software? The workshop which really caught my attention was the workshop presented by Andrei IONESCU and Adrian Liviu ARSENE who are both employed by Bitdefender: ‘Data Center Security – HYPERVISOR INTROSPECTION’. Starting with explaining how external and internal threats are evolving they quickly moved on to explain how their […]