Month: May 2016

VCAP5 Exam Retirements Suspended

May 14, 2016 vReid 0

Since we announced the retirement of the remaining VCAP5 exams in late March, we have heard from quite a number of you who have requested additional time to prepare for and take those exams. Additionally, we are still working on the development and refinement of the VCAP6 exams (which will replace VCAP5), so these new exams have not yet been released in production. In light of your requests and still-pending VCAP6 exam releases, we are suspending the retirement of the following exams: VCAP5 Design Exams: VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 — Data Center Design (VCAP5-DCD) Exam #VDCD550 VCAP Lab Exams: VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 — Data Center Administration (VCAP5-DCA) Exam #VDCA550 VMware Certified Implementation Expert — Network Virtualization (VCIX-NV) Exam […]

RDMs and Microsoft Failover clusters

May 13, 2016 vReid 0

Unfortunately we have large number of virtual Microsoft failover cluster with RDM’s in virtual compatibility mode. Moving to SQL Always On is too expensive and our application owners refuse to acknowledge HA as an alternative. The issue with adding RDM’s is when you need to reboot an ESXi host it rescans for all these devices. As the amount of RDM’s increases this rescanning process can take up to an hr… Obviously waiting an hr is not acceptable so VMware created the following KB article to perennially reserve these devices. The issue I’ve experienced is when you have 100’s of RDM’s across 30-40 ESXi hosts, gathering all the devices using “esxcli storage core device list” and creating a script can be […]

UCS Central Pool Usage

May 12, 2016 vReid 0

I am luckily enough to work in a large environment with multiple UCS domains. However, managing multiple domains (nearly 9 in my case) can be challenging when you have 9 sets of different WWNN / WWPN , IP, UUID and MAC address  pools to manage. Cisco provide UCS Central which allows centralised management of all these domains. Something I came across in UCS manager is I could select a pool and view which service profiles were assigned to the pool values. However, in UCS Central this functionality appears to have disappeared… Instead of listing the service profile a particular value is assigned to (in this case the WWPN) you simply get “assigned-to-single”. I am not sure why this functionality was […]

VMware Application Dependencies and Entity Relationship Diagrams MK2

May 11, 2016 Don Ward 0

From vBikerBlog.com OK ladies and gentleman it's been a while since my last post and that's primarily down to things like looking after babies and changing jobs. The reasons for the job change was primarily because I felt I needed to get more true enterprise experiences in order to achieve a true understanding of Enterprise Architecting. Most if not all of my work to date as been in the SMB spaces so therefore the amount of complexity hasn't really been relevant to the point where I felt it could justify me becoming a VCDX. Anyway moving on to the subject at hand. You may recall that previously I questioned VMware's stance on their concept and point of view when it comes to […]

Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32 ERROR

May 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had this wonderful error happen to me recently. I am in the process of migrating the Management IPs from one network to another on all the hosts in the environment. It is part of a bigger plan to migrate everything including the vCenter components to a new IP range ( I am not looking forward to that esp since this is a 5.1 environment!). I did that and updated DNS, flushed the DNS caches on my machine and on the PRTG probes etc. The host came back up fine, but when it rejoined vCenter it had this wonderful error message: Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disk/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0. As a result, host configuration changes will […]

Setting a persistant scratch location on a ESXi host

May 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I noticed one of the hosts had a warning saying that: So basically I did what this KB article said: VMware KB article I had a look at another host, and had a look at the Advanced Settings value for: ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation It showed a VMFS volumes /vmfs/volumes/UUID/Scratch folder for that host. So it showed me the UUID such as this: vmfs/volumes/51dda02d-fade5016-8a08-005056171889/HOSTNAME So it looked like there was a folder on this LUN every host! So since I am new to this environment I had to find a way to translate the UUID to the name of the actual SAN datastore being used. I did this by using the: esxcli storage filesystyem list | grep UUID This gave me the actual […]

HP StoreVirtual 4335

May 9, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I’m a big fan of HP StoreVirtual. It’s a great solution for stretched storage clusters, and I’ve worked on numerous environments with StoreVirtual at the storage layer. Firstly, if you don’t know what StoreVirtual is and how it works: It’s a clustered SAN solution, usually comprising of a minimum of 2x nodes but you can use a single node. They’re actually HP DL3xx servers full of disks; they use HP RAID controllers (normally 4xx series) and the same discrete cards you’d expect to find in servers not running for storage alone. Locally, disks run in RAID (5 for some models, 6 and 10 for others). Volumes that are presented to servers can be configured in “network RAID” such as network […]

Setting up a HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 and a EMC CX4-120

May 6, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So we decided to re-provision some old storage kit we had lying around. We found that we had an old StorageWorks P2000 G3 and a EMC CX4-120. We decided to attach them to a HP DL380 G6 we had spare, and fit that server with 2x8Gb HBAs and 2xSAS cards. The HBAs to attach to the EMC and the SAS cards to attach to the HP. So I installed 2012 on the physical box, got it all up and running. I noticed an issue with the SAS cards that on boot sometimes they wouldn't initialize and they would have the yellow exclamation mark next to them in the Windows device manager, and I found that by just disabling and re-enabling […]