VEXPERT

Storage vMotion Thin to Thick Lazy Scripting #vExpert #PowerCLI #PowerShell #vSphere

August 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 1

Well hello, there party people! I recently came across an issue where the customer had just configured alerting to look for Thin Provisioned VMs, and to my and their dismay it came back with over 300 VMs across 2 sites in staging and production that were like this. Now they have Dell Compellent SANs and these Thin Provision at the storage layer too, so it was basically thin on thin! Now the key points here were: Let’s figure out why this happened Let’s fix the issue for the currently deployed VMs and for future deployments Now we did some digging and it appears the Devs and their automation scripting were the cause of the issue. In their scripts, they had it […]

VEXPERT: Increasing the number of vExperts in Belgium and Luxembourg

June 5, 2018 Kim Bottu 3

 An excellent idea “Yes, that is an excellent idea!” was Tom’s reply when I asked him if he would mind if I would try to encourage more people to join the vExpert program in Belgium. Probably you don’t know, but there are only 14 VEXPERTS in BeLux (Belgium and Luxembourg combined). Not a big number. It is shocking that a similarly sized country such as the Netherlands manages to have 92 vExperts compared to 14 in BeLux!  We are convinced that the vExpert presence in Belgium and Luxembourg might increase if only people would see what the program can do for them and how good the vCommunity is to its family members. My small idea about encouraging the vExpert program […]

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 […]

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The Evolution of Storage – A VMUG presentation (Dutch)

May 17, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Back in March, I shared a presentation with Duncan Epping during the NLVMUG. This VMUG is one of the biggest and oldest VMUGs in the world. I presented the current state followed by Duncan, who is very well positioned to cover all the things that are still work in progress. A month ago the NLVMUG Usercon published the presentation video on YouTube. Enjoy this presentation.

Flashblog: DCIS-Cube

May 12, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Over the last couple of months I had been involved in the development of the ‘DCIS-Cube’, the new architecture that will be used as a ‘portable’ and easy deploy-able system by NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency). Portability and the ease of deployment of infrastructure in regions of deployment have always been challenging for the NCI. When they have to deploy a small datacenter to support a mission somewhere on the globe, they have to ship a couple of racks with hardware to that specific place.  Apart from the logistical nightmare of moving a ton of hardware,  they are struggling with the actual deployment of all that hardware as well. As every single mission has different requirements they can’t prepare the solution somewhere […]

First impressions: VMware HCI assessment

May 11, 2018 Stijn Depril 2

VMware launched a new HCI assessment tool. Last week Duncan Epping reached out to me. He had a customer asking him if he could have a look into the environment so they could better size the environment with VSAN. I got in contact with the customer on Friday and on Tuesday we had a call in which we discussed the whole environment. Even Mister Epping is impressed with it. Customer reached out a week ago, wanted to know if vSAN would be an option for them. Connected them with @sdepril and within 3 days a full report was produced using the new VMware HCI Assessment tool. It is really powerful! Read more about the tool here: https://t.co/G8u6gpPaCz — Duncan Epping […]

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Veeam Restore Issue #VEEAM #BACKUPS #vEXPERT #VMware #vSphere

March 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So recently I came across an issue where Veeam would restore from a backup and it would be marked as successful, but when you went to power the VM on it would fail with a CID mismatch (of course you can fix this manually by messing around in the vmdk files, but you shouldn’t need to do this). On closer inspection of the restored VM, you would see that the VEEAM RESTORE SNAPSHOT was still in place. In the restore logs I noticed : Create snapshot, ref “vm-401631”, name “VEEAM RESTORE SNAPSHOT”, description “”, memory “False”, quiesce “False” [16.02.2018 16:01:37] <01> Info [Soap] Snapshot VM ‘vm-401631’ was created. Ref: ‘snapshot-401632’ [Soap] Reverting snapshot snapshot-401632 [16.02.2018 16:07:53] <01> Info [VimApi] RevertSnapshot, type “VirtualMachineSnapshot”, ref “snapshot-401632” [16.02.2018 16:07:53] <01> Error […]

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 […]