vSphere 5.x

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 […]

No Image

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 […]

No Image

Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

VCDX Defense Presentation: Mapping it’s genome

May 10, 2017 Jason Grierson 1

So after hours of working on your design, submission, and with some patient waiting you finally get that email from VMware stating your design has been accepted for defense!  Quickly you go into over drive and start ferociously working on your defense presentation.  Now maybe you already started working on your design presentation, maybe you haven’t but I find the questions typically always have a trend of similarity with the biggest one being: HOW do I take a 100-500 page VMware design and cram it into 20-30 presentation slides and get the message across in 75min? So first off why 20-30 slides?  Well taking the 75min you have to defend and dividing that by 20 will leave you roughly 3.75min […]

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 […]

The Host Virtual MAC Address Riddle

September 5, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 1

For ages I have been pondering over ‘something’ which seems very trivial and the fact I can’t get any solid info on it is driving me nuts: Why does every pNIC also have a virtual MAC address? So here with have the VMkernel ports, a VSS and pNICS: Just as you would expect, every physical NIC (pNIC) on a host has a MAC address. BUT when you type ‘esxcfg-info -n‘ in the shell, you will notice that every vmnic also has a Virtual MAC Address!   \==+Physical Nic : |—-Name…………………………………………..vmnic3 |—-PCI Segment…………………………………….0 |—-PCI Bus………………………………………..2 |—-PCI Slot……………………………………….0 |—-PCI function……………………………………1 |—-MAC Address…………………………………….XX:XX:XX:32:06:1f |—-Virtual MAC Address……………………………..00:50:56:52:06:1f |—-FPT Shareable………………………………..true Now as you can see the Virtual MAC Address starts off with a VMware MAC and then finishes at the […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Intro

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This is my series regarding my journey towards VCIX-NV. This series is not about giving you a full hands-on guide for the exam as many have already done this well, but this is only about adding more remarks about the lab issues and other useful resources. For those who don’t know VCIX-NV is a practical-lab certification for VMware NSX. To be able to pass the exam you will need a home-lab or some old servers at work which have been setup with vSphere and NSX so you can get your hands dirty. This is just an introduction I will list my used resources, my home lab configuration and a short description of what my virtual lab is gonna be like. Used Resources: VMware […]