Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Third Edition #BookReview #Powershell #PowerCLI #Scripting #vExpert

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So if you follow my posts, one thing you will know about me is that I like learning new things and picking up skills. Through my whole time of working with vSphere, I have used PowerCLI in one way or another. I can muddle my way around a bit, but it has always niggled at me that I don’t know it as well as I could. When people were talking about scripting or sharing their scripts, I could barely follow along, and that to me is very annoying. I always at least want to have a solid base understanding. So I finally got around to buying this book and using it. Whenever you ask around about learning PowerShell, EVERYBODY and I […]

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 […]

Flashblog: DCIS-Cube

May 12, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Over the last couple of months I had been involved in the development of the ‘DCIS-Cube’, the new architecture that will be used as a ‘portable’ and easy deploy-able system by NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency). Portability and the ease of deployment of infrastructure in regions of deployment have always been challenging for the NCI. When they have to deploy a small datacenter to support a mission somewhere on the globe, they have to ship a couple of racks with hardware to that specific place.  Apart from the logistical nightmare of moving a ton of hardware,  they are struggling with the actual deployment of all that hardware as well. As every single mission has different requirements they can’t prepare the solution somewhere […]

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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 […]

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] […]

Bitdefender – True Agentless protection

June 13, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Last week I was in London at the InfoSecurity convention having a look what is happening in the security world. If you have never attended InfoSecurity, it is a free event where most of the presentations are a bit loaded on the marketing side.  Of course there are always exceptions. The 2-hour workshops are truly gems. At least the workshops which I did attend to. What if you could protect VM’s without agents or without any other piece of installed software? The workshop which really caught my attention was the workshop presented by Andrei IONESCU and Adrian Liviu ARSENE who are both employed by Bitdefender: ‘Data Center Security – HYPERVISOR INTROSPECTION’. Starting with explaining how external and internal threats are evolving they quickly moved on to explain how their […]

NetworkingForVMwareAdministrators

Book Review: Networking for VMware Administrators

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been collecting lots of books ever since I started on my journey of doing my VCAPs. One book time and again has been my go to reference for absolutely anything VMware networking related….and you guessed it…IT’S THIS BOOK! When I have been in chats with networking guys, and we have been discussing various features, I can point them to sections of the book, and if I need to confirm something I can double check it quickly. You do not need to be a networking guru to use this book. I have/had a CCNA (it has expired), so I have a fair idea, but I am by no means a networking guru and I have learnt plenty from […]

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Many Cores per Socket or Single-Core Socket Mystery

May 11, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 3

Hi All During some readings, I remembered the eternal debatable Question when creating SMP VM (VM with many vCPUs): “Which is better: many Cores in a single socket or many Sockets each with single core..??” I remember how many times I debated for hours with my technical manager -while reviewing some designs- about the same question, but neither of us could prove a bit. To answer this question, we have to review some concepts: NUMA CPU Configuration: Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is a CPUs configuration, in which each CPU has some Memory DIMMs local and connected to it. Each CPU can access both its local memory DIMMs with lowest latency and the remote DIMMs with higher latency using Interconnecting […]