VCDX Journey – Part 3 – Design Scenario

May 10, 2018 Manny Sidhu 2

Part 3 of this series will go over the oft overlooked design scenario. My advice with scenario is to (while keeping in mind I haven’t achieved the number yet): Listen carefully and keep prying out information from the panelists. They’re playing the role of customers, sometimes difficult customers. Maybe one of them won’t speak at all only to throw that wrench in when you’re about to clinch it. Watch out for that silent panelist 😉 If that wrench is thrown, tell them you’re going to erase a certain section of the whiteboard because the information you wrote on there is now irrelevant because of a changed requirement or a new constraint you’ve discovered as a result of that wrench. Make […]

VCDX Journey – Part 2 – Where I Messed It Up

May 10, 2018 Manny Sidhu 0

This post will cover those bits where I messed it up. In case you missed Part 1 of this series, check it out here. So in no particular order: Insufficient technical depth This might be a strange one to some, especially the people just starting out on this path. You’ll likely hear – keep your presentation at the logical level – by a lot of people. This is true for the most part and you should absolutely avoid getting tangled in a time-wasting explanation of say how multi-NIC vMotion works. Instead focus on how this decision fulfilled a business need (things like minimizing maintenance windows etc..). But.. I realized after the first two attempts the panelists were prodding me for […]

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, […]

My VCAP6.5-Design Experience

April 27, 2018 Manny Sidhu 1

This past weekend I sat for and successfully passed the VCAP6.5-Design exam. It was great to finally pass an exam on the first go (I’ve had a torrid run recently, that’s going to be another post on its own). Here’re some details about the exam environment, my experience and suggestions for future takers. Exam center: When booking the exam I needed to find a center that offered exams on the weekend. Turns out Aviation Training Service Victoria in Airport West was the only one that offered Saturdays and Sundays. I booked an 8am appointment for the exam, I thought I rocked up nice and early at about 7.40, lo and behold the parking was full as. The center also offers […]

Back 2 VSAN Basics

April 26, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

I see VSAN “in the wild” on a daily basis and very often I get questions about the basics of VSAN. Don’t get me wrong, questions are absolutely a good thing!  What I also see, is that people often ignore the practices and assume it will be OK with a next/next/finish. You guessed it right: This doesn’t go well! Therefor I have decided to start with ‘a VSAN basics’ blog series. What is VSAN What’s important to run VSAN well And why is it important for the success of your project Let’s start with a bit of history For the last decades we have been procuring new storage in the same way as we used to do in the previous […]

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 […]

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam 2018 Exam #AWS @acloudguru @AWS @AWS_UKI #vExpert

April 23, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So it has taken me a while to get on this cloud train! After my VCDX I wanted to get my Linux skills up to a more competent level. It has been a weak point of mine for a very long time. Now from my previous posts you can see I have managed to do that and now it is time to focus more on cloud!   Where I am working currently we are going through a couple of proof of concepts using AWS and GCP. Since they will given to me in due course, I felt it was important to have a base line level of skill!   So the first thing I did was use the Cloud Guru […]

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Veeam Restore Issue #VEEAM #BACKUPS #vEXPERT #VMware #vSphere

March 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So recently I came across an issue where Veeam would restore from a backup and it would be marked as successful, but when you went to power the VM on it would fail with a CID mismatch (of course you can fix this manually by messing around in the vmdk files, but you shouldn’t need to do this). On closer inspection of the restored VM, you would see that the VEEAM RESTORE SNAPSHOT was still in place. In the restore logs I noticed : Create snapshot, ref “vm-401631”, name “VEEAM RESTORE SNAPSHOT”, description “”, memory “False”, quiesce “False” [16.02.2018 16:01:37] <01> Info [Soap] Snapshot VM ‘vm-401631’ was created. Ref: ‘snapshot-401632’ [Soap] Reverting snapshot snapshot-401632 [16.02.2018 16:07:53] <01> Info [VimApi] RevertSnapshot, type “VirtualMachineSnapshot”, ref “snapshot-401632” [16.02.2018 16:07:53] <01> Error […]