June 2016 -

vCNS 5.5 to NSX 6.2.3 upgrade – vCenter Lookup Not connecting

June 29, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

Yesterday I performed a vCNS 5.5 upgrade to NSX 6.2.3. I did run into issues later on the day thanks to NTP, there is a small gotcha here even if you had set it up correctly! The environment: vCenter 5.5 VCSA + embedded SSO ESXi 5.5 vCNS 5.5 ( vShield Manager + vShield APP Firewalls) some VMs ( including DHCP and Domain Controller) NTP running from a Windows Server Performing the upgrade of vCNS is pretty straight forward: Download the NSX upgrade package: VMware-vShield-Manager-upgrade-bundle-to-NSX-6.2.3-3979471.tar.gz. Open the vCNS vShield Manager Go to Updates and Upload Upgrade Bundle After the upgrade you might end up with a web interface which looks like a mix of vCNS and NSX. Flush the […]

REVIEW: Architecting EUC Solutions

June 26, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Each year I order a couple of books even though I have no idea if they will be books which contain content I can actually use. The reasons to buy these books varies: The title might look promising, there is a lot of buzz about a book or it can be as plain and simple as me liking the cover of a book. Brian Suhr’s book belongs to the first category, the title looked promising. Such a strategy can result in picking bad books of course. This book is not a book that does not deliver though. After having read Architecting EUC Solutions I would say this book is quite the opposite to me, an EUC compendium ‘par […]

IT Architect: Foundation in the Art of Infrastructure Design Review

June 15, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 3

I picked up a copy of this book pretty much as soon as it was released. Most architects I’ve spoken to have recommended this book, so I didn’t want to miss it! Where to start. First impressions The book gets off to a running start, there is no build-up towards hitting you with some great knowledge (the authors have also managed to get a number of VCDXs to answer the question “what is infrastructure design?”). You’ll get stuck in right from the beginning regarding how you should approach solutions design, from the various stages (such as discovery, design, build etc.), design methodologies straight through to really useful case studies. It’s really quite difficult to get this amount of technical information through across […]

VSAN 6.2 Online resource calculator

June 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Hello All! Yes, this is an Online Excel sheet to calculate how many hosts, storage, physical CPU’s, virtual CPU’s, RAM, Cache and so on you need. I still need to add the bits and pieces to calculate the amount of components, disks and disk groups which are needed to serve all workloads, but I figured this might already be useful to some. I am human, so mistakes happen, so if you spot any mistakes or omissions, please let us know. You can find the online excel table at the bottom and fields can be modified. Contrary to the VSAN 6.0 calculator I have decided not to show the whole table but only the boxes you have to fill in and the results. To see […]

REVIEW: Pluralsight – Overview of TOGAF® 9.1

June 7, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

For quite some time now I have set my eyes on getting TOGAF certified. Not that I think that getting TOGAF certified instantaneously will make anyone an Enterprise Architect, but it would definitely proof that someone (in this case me, myself and I) has some insights into where enterprises and architecture meet. Yes this includes IT infrastructure as well! Discovering the right literature was rather easy. The Opengroup not only sells its own books to help you get TOGAF certified, but also is friendly enough to offer a digital version free of charge on the internet. Finding good video courses proved to be a lot harder. PuralSight – Overview of the TOGAF® 9.1 Enterprise Architecture Framework, by Joseph Anthony For anyone who has no idea what TOGAF and/or […]

WARNING: Veeam Backup VDDK error 1 and 2 ESXi 5.5/6 Veeam B&R v8/9

June 7, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 4

Also read the follow up post: VeeAM Backup VDDK error Follow-up and solution So recently I came across a strange problem. Random VMs from various different jobs, would fail to back up, I would get a VDDK error. Now the last time I had this error, was when I had just joined a company and it turned out to be a faulty disk on a local host that had failed, and it had been in a failed state for so long that the whole vdisk on the Dell host was compromised and I had a punctured RAID. There was no monitoring in place! rest assured that’s sorted now. But these were all SAN based, on different datastores and on different SANs. […]

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 […]

VMAX3 with Solutions Enabler and vSphere SRM 6.0 Configuration Guide

June 5, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Last weekend, I was engaged by one of our biggest clients, a bank, to upgrade its virtual infrastructure to vSphere 6 and to migrate their infrastructure to new VMAX 3 storage arrays in both main and DR site. It’s one of only two customers in Egypt that uses vSphere SRM with VMAX Arrays for DR purposes. VMAX3 Arrays are enterprise-level arrays from EMC. They’re the descendant of the great Symmetrix Arrays and they use their own replication engine, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF). To manage SRDF and integrate it with any other solution for DR Automation and Management, it requires a software component called Solutions Enabler (SE). This software consists of a client and a server component. SE server is either installed on a […]