Bilal Ahmed, Author at

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, […]

Resizing VMDKs with vSphere Replication #vExpert #vSphereReplication

December 12, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

*picture from VMware docs Now then, everyone that has used VR knows that resizing VMDKs for replicated VMs isn’t the easiest thing to do. But I have come across people who seem to believe that the only way to resize the VMDKs is via the CLI on a host….this is one of the options BUT IS NOT the only one. Resizing via the CLI: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2052883 > No need for me to repeat what it says, but you do it using vmkfstools. It works well but does require the person to have access to the host directly. The key point when using vmkfstools , which isn’t totally clear in the kb is: If the original size was 550GB and the new […]

Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

VCDX #251 at your service with a smile!

June 18, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I recently managed to get my VCDX number! waheyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy It was a long process for me, which I am now going to break down. Hopefully this will give people some insight into how everything comes together and I do hope it will give future candidates an idea of how to approach it. The Start So back in early 2016 I knew someone who was considering pursuing the VCDX, and they asked if I wanted to partner up with them. I initially declined…..simply because I didn’t think I had the skill level currently to even consider such a task. Their response was ………..how else are you going to get the skill set? Upon thinking about it, that made perfect sense […]

Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 SRM and VR Protection Advanced Settings Riddle

February 7, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

When you use SRM (in my case SRM version 5.8.1) in combination with VR to protect your VMs, SRM will own these VMs. You will not be able to recover these protected VMs using vSphere Replication on its own, as long as they are SRM protected. This became an issue for us, simply because we had an issue where the SRM service would fail to start at the DR site. Working with VMware support we got it working again but neither VMware Support or myself really knew what the root cause was. A little SRA and SRM history We are using SRM in combination with SRA’s and had a Recovery Plan that was stuck in partial re-protect mode and no amount […]