Articles by Graeme Vermeulen

Adding new blades to a C7000 chassis

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I recently installed some HP ProLiant BL460c blades into a C7000 chassis. First task was to unbox the blades and install the mezzanine cards: The position of your card depends on which slots you’ve populated at the back. There are 8 slots at the back for your networking, whether you’re using ethernet or fibre cards. Make sure you install the mezzanine card into the corresponding slot, in my case it’s into slot 2. Note – because these are only half-height blades, they only have 2 mezzanine slots each. Full-height blades will have 3. Here’s a guide on port mapping: http://virtualkenneth.com/2012/11/26/understanding-hp-virtual-connect-flexfabric-mappings-with-vmware-vsphere/ Please note that your blades will get their iLO settings from the blade chassis Enclosure Bay IP Addressing configuration, which […]

P2V a server that’s isolated from vCenter

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Scenario faced –   My customer has a web server that’s currently hosted in a datacentre. They want to bring this web server in house and use their vSphere platform to host it as a VM, saving around £1000 per month. I have to mention that this is a single web server with no load balancing, it’s an online ordering site that doesn’t experience a high amount of traffic (it’s basically a wholesale ordering site, only certain customers are allowed to buy through it). The server I need to virtualise is in a datacentre, how can I import that into the vSphere environment? There will definitely be downtime, there’s no escaping that. The DC is miles away from the new […]

My VCAP5-DCD Experience

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

The VCAP-DCD550 is a hard exam. I’d go as far as to say the hardest exam I’ve ever done. Basically, unless you’ve actually worked for a VMware reseller as a designer and had hands-on experience installing and maintaining the technology, it will be a very tough slog indeed. However, even with this knowledge and experience, it’s still a difficult exam to master. Part of the challenge is getting your head around all of the terminology, best practices and VMware’s way of design and implementation. It’s been widely acknowledged that the DCD510 version was easier yet longer, as multiple choice was added to the mix and I also believe you couldn’t go back to review a question once you’d clicked “Next”. […]

Adding a second NIC to a VCSA

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Here’s how you add an additional NIC on a VCSA – and I’ll show you step-by-step with actual keyboard commands as no other guides out there do: The VAMI can be accessed via https://(IP or FQDN):5480 – the username is normally root and the default password is vmware Typically this is what you’d see on most standard instances: Adding the additional NIC in vSphere in as easy to do as you’d expect: But you won’t see the additional NIC in the VAMI: It will actually start throwing errors. We need to set add the new NIC manually. To do this, you can either use CLI or YaST2. YaST2 is a SUSE management tool which lets you configure basic elements of […]

Can’t login using Windows Session Credentials – VCSA (vSphere 6)

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Quite a few things seem to have changed with the VCSA in vSphere 6. The most obvious change is that the appliance is no longer deployed as an OVA / OVF template but rather from an ISO image. As part of deploying the ISO, you’ll be prompted to put in your settings for the vCenter before it’s even powered on. This can be quite tricky to get right the first time – so make sure you have created the relevant DNS records on your DNS servers and configured your VM network on the chosen host for initial deployment. Setting up SSO for your Windows Domain is exactly the same, however when ticking the “Use Windows Session Credentials” box you will […]