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 […]

Attending AWSome Day #AWSomeDay #AWS @AWS_UKI @AWScloud

March 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the opportunity to attend this event in Manchester. As someone who has been digging into AWS this year and planning to do the cert, I thought going to this event would be worthwhile. It was also a great chance to meet other people jumping into the cloud and AWS in general. It also gave me the chance to bombard the AWS techies with questions and scenarios that were running through my mind. I bombarded both @AWSTomWoodyer and @ric__harvey with questions and they were more than happy to answer them. It was split into two tracks Technical and Management. I kept in the technical until towards the end of the day, where I then jumped into management track as they were discussing […]

Time for a change .. employee numero uno!

March 15, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

For over eight years I have been working for the same employer . It’s been a wonderful eight years:  I have met lots of wonderful colleagues, some of them will remain friends for my entire life and together we have travelled to places and have spend sometimes up to 14 hours a day working alongside friends to get work done. But we always found the time to end the day with a nice dinner and some drinks. Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hong Kong and Moscow, we have visited them all in the name of work. Magical times. Over the course of eight years I became more and more VMware minded, up to the point where they started calling me ‘VMware […]

Rebuilding your VSAN lab in Ravello is easy and takes no time!

February 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

I really like the Free vEXPERT Ravello tier to run some quick tests but it has few disadvantages: The limited amount of CPU hours. The time it takes to upload images, create VMs, blueprints, applications and networks. The time it takes to create a new lab environment from scratch can take a lot of hours. The more servers you add to your lab environment, the longer it will take to create it. But as soon as I had figured out how to create my applications, VMs and blueprints, it was very easy to come up with a plan to deploy new test environments in different regions or to replace my corrupted labs with only a few mouse clicks. The time to deploy a […]

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Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) Exam Review #LinuxFoundation @linuxfoundation #Linux #CentOS @sandervanvugt @tecmint #vExpert

January 16, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 9

So I never originally planned to do this exam! But after I did the LFCS (see my review here) I realised I was not that far off from getting the LFCE, and since I was on a roll I thought WHY NOT!? Now the blueprint for the LFCS was very very broad, to the point it made it very difficult to study for, but the blueprint for the LFCE is much more concise: Current LFCE Blueprint :  Network administration Configure network services to start automatically at boot Implement packet filtering Monitor network performance Produce and deliver reports on system use, outages and user requests Route IP traffic statically and dynamically Troubleshoot network issues Network filesystems and file services Configure systems to mount […]

Mapping the VCDX Defense Genome Part 3: Is All Flash a Trap?!

January 5, 2018 Jason Grierson 0

Hey everyone, So prior to the holidays I was helping mentor some new VCDX candidates for their re-defenses and was coming across a few trends that I wanted to discuss a little as they started creeping up over and over again.  These trends were All Flash SAN’s, Oversized Compute, and questions being asked that were not part of the candidates design.  We’ll get into the last point a little more but first lest tackle the first two. All Flash SAN Is All Flash SAN a VCDX trap?  No of course not the All Flash SAN is obviously a silver bullet when it comes to storage as it greatly reduces the complexity of the storage system while giving amazing performance.  Gone […]

RAVELLO: Windows vCenter 6.5 vCenter server errors: 500, 503

December 20, 2017 Kim Bottu 3

If you use a cleanly installed Windows based vCenter server in the #VEXPERT FREE TIER of RAVELLO cloud you might have seen the following errors as well. For me there errors were the cause that my VSAN lab would not properly work anymore, so I had to find a solution fast. I assume these errors appear because in the Free Tier,  Ravello isn’t always the fastest environment to start up your server nor to run your workloads. So some services might be timing out while starting up. This will result in a handful of vCenter services not being reachable and an unreachable management plane.  Yes this also applies to a Windows based vCenter server  with an embedded PSC. A server error occurred. [500] […]