Bilal Ahmed, Author at

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 […]

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 […]

Attending AWSome Day #AWSomeDay #AWS @AWS_UKI @AWScloud

March 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the opportunity to attend this event in Manchester. As someone who has been digging into AWS this year and planning to do the cert, I thought going to this event would be worthwhile. It was also a great chance to meet other people jumping into the cloud and AWS in general. It also gave me the chance to bombard the AWS techies with questions and scenarios that were running through my mind. I bombarded both @AWSTomWoodyer and @ric__harvey with questions and they were more than happy to answer them. It was split into two tracks Technical and Management. I kept in the technical until towards the end of the day, where I then jumped into management track as they were discussing […]

Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) Exam Review #LinuxFoundation @linuxfoundation #Linux #CentOS @sandervanvugt @tecmint #vExpert

January 16, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 9

So I never originally planned to do this exam! But after I did the LFCS (see my review here) I realised I was not that far off from getting the LFCE, and since I was on a roll I thought WHY NOT!? Now the blueprint for the LFCS was very very broad, to the point it made it very difficult to study for, but the blueprint for the LFCE is much more concise: Current LFCE Blueprint : Network administration Configure network services to start automatically at boot Implement packet filtering Monitor network performance Produce and deliver reports on system use, outages and user requests Route IP traffic statically and dynamically Troubleshoot network issues Network filesystems and file services Configure systems to mount […]

Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administrator (LFCS) Exam Review #LinuxFoundation @linuxfoundation #Linux #CentOS @sandervanvugt @tecmint #vExpert

December 18, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 3

So I spent a good few months brushing up on my Linux skills for this exam. Where I work there is a big proportion of VMs that run CentOS 6/7 and with all the other studying I had been doing, I had never had the time to improve my Linux skill set and it has always been an area that I was lacking in. The reason I went with the Linux Foundation is because they had a black Friday sale on last year where you could get the course and the exam (with a free retake) pretty cheap. My company paid for it and all, but it just seemed like a no brainer . You can pick from multiple distributions, […]