vSphere 6.0 Archives -

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 […]

Bitdefender – True Agentless protection

June 13, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Last week I was in London at the InfoSecurity convention having a look what is happening in the security world. If you have never attended InfoSecurity, it is a free event where most of the presentations are a bit loaded on the marketing side. Of course there are always exceptions. The 2-hour workshops are truly gems. At least the workshops which I did attend to. What if you could protect VM’s without agents or without any other piece of installed software? The workshop which really caught my attention was the workshop presented by Andrei IONESCU and Adrian Liviu ARSENE who are both employed by Bitdefender: ‘Data Center Security – HYPERVISOR INTROSPECTION’. Starting with explaining how external and internal threats are evolving they quickly moved on to explain how their […]

Very persistent NTP issues on VCSA and PSC appliances

May 11, 2017 Kim Bottu 3

For the 2 weeks I had been having very annoying NTP sync issues on some of my VCSA and PSC appliances in one of the datacenters. While my SSO domain and vCenter enhanced linked mode were for the most part working properly, it still bugged me that the NTP clocks on my PSC and VCSA in datacenter 1 were properly syncing with the NTP source (windows NTP source), but the NTP time on my PSC and VCSA in datacenter 2 were always off with somewhere between 3 to 7 minutes with the clocks of all my other appliances and Windows VM’s. They did how ever sync properly with each other. (For trouble shooting purposes, I pointed all appliances to a single NTP source in a single […]

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 […]

Bootstrap a Single-node VSAN Cluster under Running vCenter Server

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In my NSX Lab, I needed a single-node cluster with VSAN enabled beside another normal cluster with three nodes. William Lam has a genius post about how to bootstrap a single-node VSAN cluster to add your vCenter on it in your lab, but unfortunately even though his advice works perfectly when you have a single ESXi host, it does not work well when you already have a vCenter in place. My story begins from the VSAN Default Storage Policy. This policy enforces that a deployment of VMs needs to have: Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT =1 ): That means that the minimum number of nodes has to be 3 nodes and each VM disk has to be configured in RAID-1. Number of disk stripes=1: […]

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? […]

VMAX3 with Solutions Enabler and vSphere SRM 6.0 Configuration Guide

June 5, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Last weekend, I was engaged by one of our biggest clients, a bank, to upgrade its virtual infrastructure to vSphere 6 and to migrate their infrastructure to new VMAX 3 storage arrays in both main and DR site. It’s one of only two customers in Egypt that uses vSphere SRM with VMAX Arrays for DR purposes. VMAX3 Arrays are enterprise-level arrays from EMC. They’re the descendant of the great Symmetrix Arrays and they use their own replication engine, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF). To manage SRDF and integrate it with any other solution for DR Automation and Management, it requires a software component called Solutions Enabler (SE). This software consists of a client and a server component. SE server is either installed on a […]