Journey to VCIX-NV – Intro

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This is my series regarding my journey towards VCIX-NV. This series is not about giving you a full hands-on guide for the exam as many have already done this well, but this is only about adding more remarks about the lab issues and other useful resources. For those who don’t know VCIX-NV is a practical-lab certification for VMware NSX. To be able to pass the exam you will need a home-lab or some old servers at work which have been setup with vSphere and NSX so you can get your hands dirty. This is just an introduction I will list my used resources, my home lab configuration and a short description of what my virtual lab is gonna be like. Used Resources: VMware […]

Bootstrap a Single-node VSAN Cluster under Running vCenter Server

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In my NSX Lab, I needed a single-node cluster with VSAN enabled beside another normal cluster with three nodes. William Lam has a genius post about how to bootstrap a single-node VSAN cluster to add your vCenter on it in your lab, but unfortunately even though his advice works perfectly when you have a single ESXi host, it does not work well when you already have a vCenter in place. My story begins from the VSAN Default Storage Policy. This policy enforces that a deployment of VMs needs to have: Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT =1 ): That means that the minimum number of nodes has to be 3 nodes and each VM disk has to be configured in RAID-1. Number of disk stripes=1: […]

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REVIEW: Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition

June 6, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

On Friday my pre-order of Duncan Epping’s and Cormac Hogan’s updated book for VSAN was finally available for download. A few clicks on the website of PearsonITcertification and I was ready to start reading. I took the whole weekend to read this book. The structure of the book: The books reads very pleasantly mostly because it has been well structured, and despite the technical nature of the content of this book (of course this is why we buy it), it is easy to follow. ‘Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition’ contains ten chapters: Introduction to VSAN VSAN Prerequisites and Requirements for Deployment VSAN Installation and Configuration VM Storage Policies on VSAN Architectural Details VM Storage Policies and Virtual Machine Provisioning Management and Maintenance Stretched Cluster Designing […]

VSAN 6.0 On-Disk v2 Calculator

May 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

It has taken me some days to create this tool and I sincerely hope you can use it in preparation of your VCAP6-DCV Design exam. It might not look pretty, but it works and compared with calculating VSAN sizing by hand, the spreadsheet will save you lots of time. So feel free to use it and if you have any remarks or questions, feel free to reach out. Take me to the VSAN 6.0 On-Disk v2 Calculator!