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What is new with VMware?

October 15, 2016 Kim Bottu 2

VMworld Barcelona 2016 is finally here! How we – the ones who didn’t make it to VMworld Las Vegas – have all been counting down to this marvelous week in Spain where the weather at the time of writing this article is much better than in Belgium where a grey sky and sizzling temperatures of about 8 degrees Celsius keep me comfort (cough – cough). We did receive a lot of great news from the VMworld Las Vegas conference. For instance, it is obvious now that VSAN is here to stay and is very quickly becoming the number one for hyper converged infrastructure. Where I had doubt about the solution capabilities of VSAN 5.5 these doubts have started fading rapidly with the introduction […]

VMworld 2016

July 15, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

For the last couple of years I have been fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld. Luckily enough for me my managers see the value in me attending VMworld. I know a lot of employers think employees want to attend for the after parties and all that, will be drunk most of the evenings, hungover in the daytime and attending barely 10 % of the sessions you said you want to attend. But from the first time I have attended VMworld in 2012 I have come to realize some things: The total amount of money I spend for VMworld is way less than the costs for the offical ICM course which comes in at 3600 Euros + VAT in Belgium and at the […]

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REVIEW: VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook – Second Edition

July 5, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

Whether you are a seasoned architect who still is getting familiar with vSphere 6 or a hands-on engineer who likes to get a firmer grip on design and architecture using vSphere 6, Hersey’s updated datacenter cookbook just might be just the book you need. This book graciously keeps a good balance between datacenter design principles, best practices and howto’s. In this book Hersey takes you by the hand and guides you through the steps needed to create a virtual datacenter design using vSphere 6. Besides the necessary theoretical explanations Hersey offers his readers 75 recipes which they can use to help with the creation or optimization of a  virtual datacenter design: What are the prerequisites you need for a design? […]

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

UCS Central Pool Usage

May 12, 2016 vReid 0

I am luckily enough to work in a large environment with multiple UCS domains. However, managing multiple domains (nearly 9 in my case) can be challenging when you have 9 sets of different WWNN / WWPN , IP, UUID and MAC address  pools to manage. Cisco provide UCS Central which allows centralised management of all these domains. Something I came across in UCS manager is I could select a pool and view which service profiles were assigned to the pool values. However, in UCS Central this functionality appears to have disappeared… Instead of listing the service profile a particular value is assigned to (in this case the WWPN) you simply get “assigned-to-single”. I am not sure why this functionality was […]