Bilal Ahmed, Author at

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 […]

Moving from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 Part 1 #Upgrade #Migration #Fresh #vExpert #vSphere #VCSA

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been meaning to write a post on this for a while, so I thought I better get started! So let me tell you a story! The Beginning Now as we all know vSphere 5.5 went EOL a little while ago. So in preparation, I was investigating the various options that were available for the business, to keep them supported. When I first joined the business years ago. it was all a vSphere 5.1 environment that didn’t get patched often and hosts had very very long uptimes. the reason I was brought on board was to get a handle on this and bring it all into line. One of the first jobs was to actually re-ip the whole environment […]

VMworld Barcelona 2018 #Hackathon H4CK 4 C3N73R #RussianRoulette @kmruddy @vmwarecode @VirtualG_UK @Dark_KnightUK

November 17, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the pleasure of attending the hackathon at VMworld and meeting @kmruddy and the mighty beard! So I was asked to join up with Graham Barker @VirtualG_UK and David Taylor (WHO DOES NOT HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT) David how can you be a guy that travels around the world for Dell EMC on projects and not even have a Twitter account, you should be ashamed of yourself! They had an idea, that to me was super interesting. They were using VMware Workstation 15 with the new REST API bits, along with PowerCLI to create a quiz. After discussing the idea with them, I came up with the idea of it being called Russian Roulette. In VMware Workstation there was a […]

Cisco CyberOps CCNA #CyberOps #CCNA #Security #CyberSecurity

October 25, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now that I have completed and passed this new CCNA. I thought I would write up a blog post about the whole process. Over the last couple of years, Cisco was giving away free online scholarships for this new certification they were releasing. They provided you with the online materials and gave you a voucher to sit each exam twice for free once you had completed all the relevant online coursework. I had postponed it multiple times due to various other things (VCDX/Linux training etc). This was the final run, if I didn’t do it now there was no opportunity to do it again, so I thought why not I have nothing to lose and a lot to gain! […]

Storage vMotion Thin to Thick Lazy Scripting #vExpert #PowerCLI #PowerShell #vSphere

August 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 1

Well hello, there party people! I recently came across an issue where the customer had just configured alerting to look for Thin Provisioned VMs, and to my and their dismay it came back with over 300 VMs across 2 sites in staging and production that were like this. Now they have Dell Compellent SANs and these Thin Provision at the storage layer too, so it was basically thin on thin! Now the key points here were: Let’s figure out why this happened Let’s fix the issue for the currently deployed VMs and for future deployments Now we did some digging and it appears the Devs and their automation scripting were the cause of the issue. In their scripts, they had it […]

Passing the AWS Certified Developer – Associate Exam #AWS @acloudguru @AWS @AWS_UKI #vExpert @PSIServicesLLC

May 25, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, following on from my previous post on passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, I will now go into what I did to pass this exam! Now, to be fair there isn’t much to tell. If you have studied and passed the Architect exam, there is minimal studying you need to do to pass the Certified Developer Exam! To prepare for the exam, I bought the CloudGuru Udemy course: Udemy CloudGuru AWS Certified Developer Course At the start of the course, they mention that there is some solid overlap between the training material and what key things you need to focus on for the Developer exam if you have already done the other. I practised the things I already knew […]

VCSA 6.5 AD Lookup Issues #DNS #DIG #VMware #vExpert #VCSA #vCenter

April 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, I have been deploying a new 6.5 VCSA as part of my plan to move away from the current 5.5 deployments I am working with (a post for another time). During testing of this new deployment, I had a user come to me with a strange error. When they changed their AD password, they lost all access to the VCSA, but everything else for them worked fine, they could log in to anything else using their AD account. I could log into the VCSA fine and other users could still log in fine too. We cleared the web cache among other things, but to no joy. I couldn’t really see anything that was wrong. A few web posts mentioned that […]

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam 2018 Exam #AWS @acloudguru @AWS @AWS_UKI #vExpert

April 23, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So it has taken me a while to get on this cloud train! After my VCDX I wanted to get my Linux skills up to a more competent level. It has been a weak point of mine for a very long time. Now from my previous posts you can see I have managed to do that and now it is time to focus more on cloud! Where I am working currently we are going through a couple of proof of concepts using AWS and GCP. Since they will given to me in due course, I felt it was important to have a base line level of skill! So the first thing I did was use the Cloud Guru […]