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VSAN 6.7 U1 – What’s new?

August 27, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

Like most of us, I too have been counting down to VMworld and the big announcements it brings each year and because I have taken a keen interest into vSAN, I have been mostly wondering which announcements would be made about vSAN.  So let’s skip to what is most important to me: What is new with vSAN? By now you might have heard rumors about a new version of vSAN, and it is true ladies and gentlemen,  vSAN 6.7 Update 1 is almost upon us. A little voice told me it should be released in the 3th quarter of the year. Hybrid cloud integration. VMware realizes the importance for companies to be able to go to the cloud, to be […]

How attending VMworld changed my professional life and can change yours too!

June 3, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

It’s been six years since I attended VMworld for the very first time. Up until my very first VMworld I never had attended any vendor conference and here I was on the plane on route to Barcelona. As soon as I got off the plane and out of the airport, I immediately got smacked in the face with a heatwave. My first planning mistake became very clear as soon as I entered my hotel room: crappy air conditioning. Not really what you desire for when it is blistering hot outside. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be my only planning mistake. Ahead of the conference I had made a list of all the sessions I wanted to attend to and all the guided labs […]

Testing VSAN 6.7 network outages on Ravello is easy!

May 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up a new virtual VSAN lab on Ravello and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, aka.: OCI. There is not better time to get things done than the present, especially since vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7 have been released earlier in the month. First: a big thank you to Ian Sanderson and Raff Poltronieri for posting to get vSphere 6.7 to work on Ravello / Oracle OCI. You can read about that right here. However, I was not really pleased with the network setup on my hosts. For starters, all my interfaces had been put on the same network, both the MGMT vmnics and the VSAN vmnics. I decided to change this. Starting today, […]

VCSA 6.5 AD Lookup Issues #DNS #DIG #VMware #vExpert #VCSA #vCenter

April 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, I have been deploying a new 6.5 VCSA as part of my plan to move away from the current 5.5 deployments I am working with (a post for another time). During testing of this new deployment, I had a user come to me with a strange error. When they changed their AD password, they lost all access to the VCSA, but everything else for them worked fine, they could log in to anything else using their AD account. I could log into the VCSA fine and other users could still log in fine too. We cleared the web cache among other things, but to no joy. I couldn’t really see anything that was wrong. A few web posts mentioned that […]

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam 2018 Exam #AWS @acloudguru @AWS @AWS_UKI #vExpert

April 23, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So it has taken me a while to get on this cloud train! After my VCDX I wanted to get my Linux skills up to a more competent level. It has been a weak point of mine for a very long time. Now from my previous posts you can see I have managed to do that and now it is time to focus more on cloud!   Where I am working currently we are going through a couple of proof of concepts using AWS and GCP. Since they will given to me in due course, I felt it was important to have a base line level of skill!   So the first thing I did was use the Cloud Guru […]

VCAP6-DESIGN compute calculation

March 26, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

A few weeks ago Bilal pinged me a message and asked me if I could quickly calculate the resources for an attached VCAP compute resource question. After solving the question he told me that I had created this question on our VCAP-Design sim about a year ago and that most people get the answer wrong. So what is happening here and more importantly: why? The reason why most people are unable to solve this question is because of what is assumed and hasn’t been explicitely mentioned: overhead. I always treat overhead as a mandatory input: Workloads should be able to run without contention and there should be enough free resources to run ESXi and its tasks at all times. Unfortunately a lot of people who […]

Attending AWSome Day #AWSomeDay #AWS @AWS_UKI @AWScloud

March 26, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the opportunity to attend this event in Manchester. As someone who has been digging into AWS this year and planning to do the cert, I thought going to this event would be worthwhile. It was also a great chance to meet other people jumping into the cloud and AWS in general. It also gave me the chance to bombard the AWS techies with questions and scenarios that were running through my mind. I bombarded both @AWSTomWoodyer and @ric__harvey with questions and they were more than happy to answer them. It was split into two tracks Technical and Management. I kept in the technical until towards the end of the day, where I then jumped into management track as they were discussing […]

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 […]