Articles by Kim Bottu

Time for a change .. employee numero uno!

March 15, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

For over eight years I have been working for the same employer . It’s been a wonderful eight years:  I have met lots of wonderful colleagues, some of them will remain friends for my entire life and together we have travelled to places and have spend sometimes up to 14 hours a day working alongside friends to get work done. But we always found the time to end the day with a nice dinner and some drinks. Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hong Kong and Moscow, we have visited them all in the name of work. Magical times. Over the course of eight years I became more and more VMware minded, up to the point where they started calling me ‘VMware […]

Rebuilding your VSAN lab in Ravello is easy and takes no time!

February 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

I really like the Free vEXPERT Ravello tier to run some quick tests but it has few disadvantages: The limited amount of CPU hours. The time it takes to upload images, create VMs, blueprints, applications and networks. The time it takes to create a new lab environment from scratch can take a lot of hours. The more servers you add to your lab environment, the longer it will take to create it. But as soon as I had figured out how to create my applications, VMs and blueprints, it was very easy to come up with a plan to deploy new test environments in different regions or to replace my corrupted labs with only a few mouse clicks. The time to deploy a […]

RAVELLO: Windows vCenter 6.5 vCenter server errors: 500, 503

December 20, 2017 Kim Bottu 3

If you use a cleanly installed Windows based vCenter server in the #VEXPERT FREE TIER of RAVELLO cloud you might have seen the following errors as well. For me there errors were the cause that my VSAN lab would not properly work anymore, so I had to find a solution fast. I assume these errors appear because in the Free Tier,  Ravello isn’t always the fastest environment to start up your server nor to run your workloads. So some services might be timing out while starting up. This will result in a handful of vCenter services not being reachable and an unreachable management plane.  Yes this also applies to a Windows based vCenter server  with an embedded PSC. A server error occurred. [500] […]

VSAN 6.5 and 6.6.1 resources calculator

November 11, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

The old sheet has been modified to fall in line with the “10.2 Capacity Sizing Example II” of the VMware® vSAN™ Design and Sizing Guide for 6.5 and 6.6.1. You can download the spreadsheet here: https://vmusketeers.com/vsan-6-6-1-resources-calculator/   Kim   ps: If you see errors or have remarks,  feel free to comment.

How to setup a VSAN 6.6.1 test environment on Ravello

October 30, 2017 Kim Bottu 1

There are a couple of things to prepare before you can start setting up your VSAN 6.6.1 test on Ravello Cloud. If you don’t have an account, you can click on the picture below which will redirect you to the Oracle cloud signup page (Ravello is owned by Oracle). After signing up you will receive 30 days of free access and a budget of 300$ to spend as you wish. Images For this VSAN 6.6.1 test, I have uploaded the following files to Ravello: Server 2012 STD iso file VMware-VIM-all-6.5.0-6816762.iso VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.5.0.update01-5969303.x86_64.iso   Create a new application in Ravello In this application you will create all the VM’s you need for this test. Click on create application give it a name and […]

How to configure different networks in Ravello – vEXPERT

October 7, 2017 Kim Bottu 1

Intro As a vEXPERT I am entitled to a cloud lab provided for by Ravello Systems. By default this lab has been setup on a specific network: 10.0.0.0/16. Until today I have been placing all my objects on my canvas on that same network. Below you can see an example of that. When I take a deeper look in the network configuration of Ravello I can see that the following has been pre-configured for my convenience: A switch: Switch 1 A router: Router 1: 10.0.0.2 A DNS server: 10.0.0.1 A DHCP server: 10.0.0.1 A DHCP range: 10.0.0.1 – 10.0.255.254 A Gateway: 10.0.0.2   FreeNAS –  double interfaces Today I finally took the time to make some changes. As an example […]

VMworld 2017 – A bold and strong statement

September 15, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

There is no denying it, I am a bit disappointed because there haven’t been any major new technical announcements apart from HCX at VMworld Barcelona and the technical geek in me craves them. But I don’t want you to think that there was no big news. Actually, the opposite is true. VMworld 2017 sends out a clear message into the world. VMware has turned its back on the path of the technical wanderer who tries to redefine himself by trying to play catch up with the big technological buzzwords -such as containers, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Google,cross-cloud and micro-segmentation – and instead baffles the world with an enterprise ready eco-system which uses all of the buzz word technologies and offers access […]

VMworld 2017 – Day 3

September 14, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

On day 3, Pat Gelsinger, Ray O’ Farrell and Sanjay Poonen started off with replying some questions the audience have. Questions about a simplified model for licensing which might include NSX (the short answer is that they like to keep NSX licensing seperately for now)   the readiness of the HTML5 client (the HTML5 client contains nearly 90% of the available functionality now), had been answered. Credit was given to the open source community and Pat confirmed VMware’s continued involvement and will continue to invest in Open Source. VMware really appreciates the community that drives the Open Source. In fact there is a department in the Office of the CTO which focusses on engaging with the open source community more […]