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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 […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Part 2 – Deploying and Editing NSX Controllers Settings

July 26, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

The next components to deploy are the NSX Controllers. These are the main components of the NSX Platform Control Plane. NSX Controllers can be deployed as a single instance (not recommended for production) or in a cluster of three nodes. They’re deployed by the NSX Manager itself, with just few clicks in the NSX Manager GUI. For lab environments, you can deploy just a single instance of the NSX Controller and you will be fine. If you want to deploy three of them, you might hit a problem with resource contention, because it requires 4 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 2 GB RAM Reservation by default and you can’t edit the VM Settings. I found a blog post of Tom Fojta about downsizing NSX Controllers (In […]

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Windows vCenter vs. vCenter Server (Virtual) Appliance (vCSA/vCVA)

March 22, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 5

The following question about vCenter Server is which version to deploy: Windows vCenter Server or vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). First, let’s examine the components of any vCenter Server. They’re Single-Sign On (SSO), Inventory Service, vCenter Server, Web Client and a back-end Database.   To answer the question above, we need to take a deep look at how answer of the above question affects all of these components. Keep in mind that it’s also related to the way you’d deploy your vCenter Server Components according to your customer/case needs and requirements or constraints. Some components and other VMware products deployment are affected by wither you’d use Windows vCenter or vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). My vExpert colleague, Mohammed Raffic, made a great comparison between […]

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Virutalizing vCenter Server: Yes or No?

March 13, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 1

“Should I virtualize vCenter Server or not?!”.. This question is asked a lot, specially during preparing for new vSphere deployments. IMO, and in 99.9% of all cases I meet, I answer with “Yes!! Why not?”. vCenter Server is a central part of your Management Layer of your infrastructure that requires high level of availability and performance. vSphere 5.x is capable of providing the required level of performance for vCenter Server itself or for any one of its components (SSO, Inventory Service or Web Client) as well as its required back-end Database. In the same time, virtualizing vCenter Server provides higher level of availability, using vSphere HA and the new SMP Fault Tolerance in vSphere 6.0. Despite many advantages of virtualizing vCenter Server, […]

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Modify vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 Time Zone

March 2, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Few days ago, I went to a customer for a migration project to vSphere 5.5. After deploying vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 U2d and during configuration, I had some issues with “root” account -described here– that I needed to modify the time zone on my vCenter Server Appliance and I got a big surprise. On vCenter Appliance 5.1, I used to do it through its console as the screenshot below indicate. For vCenter Appliance 5.5, and surprisingly, this can’t be done anymore as indicated by this KB. Again, I began to search for some help, till I found this KB about how to change ESX 4.x Time-zone using service console. I thought that vSphere 4.x Service Console is a Linux Shell UI which is […]

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Unable to log in with “root” on vCenter Server Appliance 5.5

February 24, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Yesterday, I went to a customer for a migration project to vSphere 5.5. After deploying vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 U2d and configuring IP addresses, I logged in with “root” account and default password to begin configuration and I started with adding it to my customer’s AD Domain to adjust its time sync and confirm machine naming and DNS settings. After I added it successfully, I rebooted the vCenter Appliance and once it booted up I tried to log in with “root” and boom, I can’t log in. It threw an error: “Unable to authenticate user. Please try again.” First, I thought I was writing password wrong, but I wasn’t as I found that I could log in using SSH. Then, […]