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VMworld 2017 Barcelona – Are you going?

June 12, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

A couple of weeks ago I received some very pleasant news in my inbox:  “VMworld Blogger Pass, Barcelona – YOU’RE GOING!” This is the second year VMware bestows this honor on me and I am feeling as happy and honored as I felt last year. Just like last year, I had to read the email a couple of time before I was able to believe the subject of the email. *grin* Of course a free conference ticket only takes you that far. I have to extend my gratitude also to my managers who recognize the value of all the technical sessions at VMworld and who sponsor all my other costs. You guys rock! So what is this VMworld I am writing about? I have always seen VMworld […]

A different take on the SRM upgrade order

March 3, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Upgrading a vSphere environment with SRM can be tricky. If you follow the official best practice on how to upgrade vSphere and SRM you might find yourself in a position where SRM is out of commission because the last part of the upgrade process,  the part where you upgrade the DR site, fails. The official recommended way to upgrade SRM The official recommended way to upgrade SRM connected sites is to upgrade all components in the Primary sites first and then upgrade the components in the DR site. This means that you upgrade vCenter components followed by the SRM components in Primary Site A first, followed by vCenter components and the SRM components in Primary Site B and then by the vCenter components […]

ERROR vCenter 5.5U2 upgrade to vCenter 6.0U2a: 1603, A change must be made to this systems time and many others

March 3, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Recently I had several problems upgrading vCenter server 5.5U2 to vCenter server 6.0U2a. Luckily all has been solved now and I owe a huge thank you to  Ciaran McE from VMware Support who has stood by me and helped me to solve this vCenter upgrade problem. Below I am listing a handful of the errors we have seen, how you can spot them and how you can solve them. Error 1: Error 1603. Because SSO appeared to be somehow corrupt [As a test to check if SSO was intact I deleted of a local SSO group resulted in the unavailability of SSO as a whole], I had to install a new external SSO server,  remove and reinstall vCenter server and re-point […]

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 […]

vSphere Replication when using vRDMS

January 31, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 2

So you can use vRDMs with vSphere Replication: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/07/vsphere-replication-virtual-rdm.html There aren’t many use cases for it and it isn’t documented very well. So I have just been pondering over something: vSphere replication supports VMs that have vRDMs but not pRDMs. ESXi5.5 now supports vRDMs up to 62TB. What it does, is it will bring the vRDM up as a VMDK file at the DR site. I am throwing this out there as a possible option for replication of our VMs that have RDMs attached, since we have a few VMs that have RDMs attached to them and which need to be replicated too. “If you wish to maintain the use of a virtual RDM at the target location, it is possible to […]

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8.1 Unable to Export Recovery Plan History

January 10, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 1

Basically, I had a recovery plan and I had done tests/cleanups/migrations/re-protects and it all worked exactly as expected,. But each time when I wanted to export the history reports it wouldn’t do anything! I would pick the type of report I wanted (html/doc etc), I would click generate report. It would generate it fine. But when I clicked download…I would get nothing. I click it and click it and nothing would happen?! I tried Chrome and Firefox, I had rebooted the SRM  service at both sites, the Web Client service at both sites. I had tried a different user account, I simply could not get the report to export. But every other plan exported fine. Then I was asking in the […]

WARNING: Veeam Backup VDDK error 1 and 2 ESXi 5.5/6 Veeam B&R v8/9 Updated: 03/01/2017

January 3, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So this has been an ongoing saga for quite a while: Repeated VDDK error 1 and 2 This is an issue I blogged about a little while ago too, right here: WARNING: Veeam Backup VDDK error 1 and 2 ESXi 5.5/6 Veeam B&R v8/9 It has been causing people plenty of issues and although it’s simple to fix, it’s annoying and it shouldn’t be happening! Veeam and VMware have been pointing the finger at each other for months now. Personally I would lean to it being a VMware issue, simply because a restart of the management agents resolves the issue. So I have been following the thread on the Veeam forums and there has finally been an update! VMware have […]

Manny Sidhu joins our merry band of vMusketeers

December 27, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

We are delighted to announce that Manny Sidhu is joining vMusketeers! Manny currently works from Melbourne Australia, has been a vEXPERT for the last 3 years and has been announced as a vEXPERT NSX for 2016.  Like the rest of us he is a huge fan of VMware , virtualization and a certification junkie. Thanks for joining our merry band of vMusketeers Manny!