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 […]

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 […]

Emad Younis & Adam Eckerle – The vCenter server and Platform Services Controller Guide to the Galaxy

October 18, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

If you have questions about the deployment of or migration to the VCSA no matter what version, Emad and Adam are probably the guys you want to have a conversation with and the session called ‘The vCenter server and Platform Services Controller Guide to the Galaxy’ should be the first session you should check out at VMworld Barcelona. The right question to ask yourself here is: why would you want to stay with the Windows Server  hosted vCenter server? Because you are used to it and everyone in your department can support it? Because the database administrators know perfectly well how to support Oracle or MSSQL databases but no Postgres? Because the Windows vCenter server historically has supported more features and has […]

What is new in vSphere 6.5?

October 18, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

VMworld Las Vegas showed some features of what is about to come in the vSphere 6.5 platform. VMworld Barcelona is no different although I am still crossing my fingers that vSphere 6.5 GA will be announced this week. At the time of writing this blog article it is October 15 and we have had no official statement about vSphere 6.5 yet. I am hoping that VMware will keep the good tradition rolling and will announce the new vSphere platform in Barcelona. After all, in Ray Farrell’s words: “We are not going to go into some of the big advances that are coming in vSphere right now, we are gonna do that at VMworld Barcelona.” So let me introduce you to some […]