NLVMUG / UserCon videos on-line

May 8, 2019 Stijn Depril 0

One of the biggest VMUG gatherings in the world is the one in the UserCon in the Netherlands. Over 800 people visited this Usercon this year. On the agenda this year were Duncan Epping, Jad El-Zein, Frank Denneman, Kit Colbert. These rockstars presented well attended sessions or keynotes. The agenda was packed with great sessions this year. I shared the stage with my colleague in the Netherlands. We prepared and presented the sessions. Since last week you can find all sessions on-line. For our English readers and viewers – The sessions are in Dutch 💁‍♂️ VSAN – What you always wanted to know This sessions intent was to bring the general public up to speed with VSAN. In 45 minutes […]

vSphere 6.7 Design Cookbook – Review #VCDX #VCAP #vSphere #Design

May 6, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 3

Disclaimer I own the two previous versions of this book and have used them extensively and I was given a free copy of this book to review. I also know one of the authors @VirtuallyMikeB well and he assisted me on my VCDX journey too. So this book is split up into multiple chapters, and I am going to break them down a bit more. I hope this will give you a better idea of what this book is all about and if it is something you would consider buying. Chapter 1: The Virtual Data Center So this chapter focuses on some of the basics, which you will probably already know if you are reading this book. Things like the […]

NSX-T Error – Failed to uninstall the software on host. MPA not working. Host is disconnected

April 23, 2019 Manny Sidhu 14

I was starting over in my NSX-T 2.4 Datacenter Ravello lab, when I suddenly had this error show up. I reckon I was too hasty in removing something (which I don’t quite remember what) that the uninstall process would not complete and this error showed up: No amount of trying to reconfigure NSX on the host/cluster would help: CLI to the rescue. While the process to uninstall NSX-T from a host is documented in this VMware kb, it doesn’t quite tell us how to connect to a host’s NSX-T CLI. So here’s the process, elaborated a bit more than the kb article: Putty to NSX Management Cluster’s IP/DNS name Log in with the admin account Get the NSX Management Cluster’s […]

#VMUG Presentations @scottishvmug @nwenglandvmug @VirtualG_UK @vBeeGee

April 5, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

For a long while I have been pondering doing some kind of presentation at some VMUGs. They VMUG leaders have cornered me a few times to actually present, so finally I decided to do it and to pick some topics that I thought might be interesting. Since I have decided this year is going to me focusing on my presentation/soft skills, I thought presenting at VMUGs would be a good way to build up on that skill set and to help me along in my toastmasters journey. If it wasn’t for the community and the people I have met as a result, I wouldn’t be where I am at the moment, as with many things in life it is a […]

Presentations and Public Speaking #Toastmasters #publicspeaking #IceBreaker @LeedsSpeaking @Toastmasters

March 26, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

Ever since I did my VCDX I have seen the value of public speaking and the power of having good soft skills. As many people reading this will be working in the IT area, we spend most of our days in front of a computer screen and the IT world seems to attract its fair share of introverts. Now what I have learnt is that you can have all the ace technical skills in the world, but if you are unable to communicate all this info in a effective way you leave yourself at a massive disadvantage! See the VCDX submission is your technical documentation and it gets you to the dance, but the presentation and workshop skills are what […]

Dell Compellent 5020 Commissioning

March 7, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So where I am working currently they are a heavy Compellent shop. Let me give you some of the back story We have multiple SC8000s spread across 2 sites. These were specced up years ago (before my time), and are now reaching EOL. One SC8000 was reaching EOL and no one let the company know, which was a big slip up by Dell. Because the original SC8000 was an upgrade from the old White box controllers Comepllent used to use, all the disks and enclosures carried over. But the issue was that these were THAT old, that support was falling off for them, and that meant that a good chunk on the disks on that SAN were now going EOL. […]

NSX-T 2.4 – Unprecedented Enhancements

February 28, 2019 Manny Sidhu 0

NSX-T 2.4 was released about 16 hours ago when VMware’s NSBU put this blog post out. Some pretty cool enhancements to NSX-T in this release have been introduced with some of the key ones being around application-centric SDN, Ansible orchestration, API consumption, data visualization and security, Day 2 and beyond operations (upgrades, troubleshooting and migration). IMO, this brings T just about at-par with V, probably surpasses it. The version isn’t GA by the looks of it, since there isn’t a download available just yet: I took about an hour and a bit to run through what’s available to learn up about this major release and here it is for your easy reading: Increased manageability: A converged appliance cluster that slices […]

ESXi PSOD #Homelab #vExpert #ESXi

February 18, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I booted up my HP Z600, this houses my main management VMs and ESXi runs off a usb stick. So nothing fancy. On boot up I got this lovely screen of joy: I don’t like PSODs they make me sad. Looking at the error and the fact that it was happening at boot up made me think of some USB drive issue. Let’s think about it for a minute, when ESXi is loaded off a USB/SD card it will then run in memory, and if you make a change it will save it to the drive or it will save automatically every hour (KB ). One thing you have to remember is to make sure you configure the advance […]