Bilal Ahmed, Author at

Configuring/Creating Custom Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 (SRM) Alarms

December 6, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

Configuring the alarms isn’t all that easy and not documented that well. In the vExpert slack I was chatting to @railroadmanuk Tim as he was trying to configure up some alarms, and this is something I have been meaning to dig into more myself. He started me off in the right direction telling me he configures them from the vCenter server alerts. So, vCenter Server > Manage > Alarm Definitions and from here you create a new alarm. I needed to create an alarm for when a new VM is put onto a replicated datastore and an alarm when a currently protected VM has been configured in a way, which would impact its protection status (eg new VMDK on a non replicated datastore […]

The Host Virtual MAC Address Riddle

September 5, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 1

For ages I have been pondering over ‘something’ which seems very trivial and the fact I can’t get any solid info on it is driving me nuts: Why does every pNIC also have a virtual MAC address? So here with have the VMkernel ports, a VSS and pNICS: Just as you would expect, every physical NIC (pNIC) on a host has a MAC address. BUT when you type ‘esxcfg-info -n‘ in the shell, you will notice that every vmnic also has a Virtual MAC Address! \==+Physical Nic : |—-Name…………………………………………..vmnic3 |—-PCI Segment…………………………………….0 |—-PCI Bus………………………………………..2 |—-PCI Slot……………………………………….0 |—-PCI function……………………………………1 |—-MAC Address…………………………………….XX:XX:XX:32:06:1f |—-Virtual MAC Address……………………………..00:50:56:52:06:1f |—-FPT Shareable………………………………..true Now as you can see the Virtual MAC Address starts off with a VMware MAC and then finishes at the […]

VCAP6-DCV Deployment Beta

July 18, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So myself and Kim did this exam the other day. Kim hasn’t done any DCA style exam before, and he had a similar experience to me on my first go. It kind of hits you like a train and its a lot to take in initially. The beta signup period didn’t give anyone much time to actually prep for it properly. Having done the 5.5 DCA, I remember looking at some of the questions and wondering what they were wanting……exactly. I did what I thought was correct, you don’t have time to second guess yourself, you just get on with it and do what you can. The best explanation for the DCA/Deployment exam is: Imagine you are a contractor and […]

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. […]

Book Review: Networking for VMware Administrators

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been collecting lots of books ever since I started on my journey of doing my VCAPs. One book time and again has been my go to reference for absolutely anything VMware networking related….and you guessed it…IT’S THIS BOOK! When I have been in chats with networking guys, and we have been discussing various features, I can point them to sections of the book, and if I need to confirm something I can double check it quickly. You do not need to be a networking guru to use this book. I have/had a CCNA (it has expired), so I have a fair idea, but I am by no means a networking guru and I have learnt plenty from […]

Book Review: VMware vSphere Troubleshooting PACKT Publishing

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would start writing reviews on them. I just bought this one, one thing I like is that you get the pdf instantly and the physical copy comes in about 5 days. So I can access it instantly while waiting for my physical copy to turn up. I have read through most of it, it is split up into the following chapters: The Methodology of Problem Solving Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM Performance Troubleshooting Clusters Monitoring and Troubleshooting Networking Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage Advanced Troubleshooting of vCenter Server and vSphere Hosts Appendix A: Learning PowerGUI Basics Appendix B: Installing VMware vRealize Operations […]

Book Review: VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook PACKT Publishing

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

As I have stated before I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would write another review on one of the many books I own from them. This book is by far one of the best books on VMware vSphere Design that is available, it was one of the key books in my study towards the VCAP5-DCD and it was one of the main reasons I passed the exam. It is broken down into multiple chapters: The Virtual Datacenter The Discovery Process The Design Factors The vSphere Management Design The vSphere Storage Design The vSphere Network Design The vSphere Compute Design The vSphere Physical Design The Virtual Machine Design Disaster Recovery […]

VMware vSphere PERFORMANCE Book Review

May 25, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 1

I have had this book for a while and it’s the only Sybex book I have! So I thought it deserved a review. The book is split up into the following Chapters: Performance Design Building Your Toolbox The Test Lab CPU Memory Network Storage Chapter 1: This goes into detail about establishing good baselines for the various aspects of the environment. You can spurt out lots of figures, but if you don’t have a baseline that has been compiled over some time, how do you know if the current stats you are seeing are good or bad? Also it goes into design considerations and mentions the impact of scaling up or scaling out, but also points out that […]