vSphere 6.7

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 […]

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 […]

Some Basic #PowerCLI using foreach to modify #NTP and do #ESXi host backups #vExpert

February 6, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

You will have seen my earlier post about learning PowerShell, and now I am using what I think is one of the best things about PowerShell……The foreach loop. I have seen it used many times, and never fully understood it, I kind of got what it did, but now I am getting it into my head and I have been using it to try and various things. So I have been doing more bits in PowerCLI to help improve my scripting skills and just to see if I can make my life easier. Modifying NTP settings on multiple ESXi hosts There is a known bug in PowerCLI 10 where Remove-VMHostNtpServer looks like it has worked, but does not actually do […]

Where did my FTT go?

May 31, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

VMware has launched the latest generation of vSphere and VSAN and this comes with a nice list of new features and options for VSAN6.7. From this list I will highlight something new for the HTML5 client. 4Kn drive support. vSphere and vSAN FIPS 140-2 validation. HTML5 interface. vRealize Operations within vCenter Server. Windows Server Failover Clustering support. Intelligent site continuity for stretched clusters. Witness traffic separation for stretched clusters. Efficient inter-site resync for stretched clusters. Fast failovers when using redundant vSAN networks. Adaptive resync for dynamic management of resynchronization traffic. Consolidation of replica components. vSAN destaging optimizations. Health check additions and improvements. vSAN Support insight. Swap object thin provisioning and policy inheritance improvements. Where did my FTT go? In the lastest edition of vSphere […]

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 […]

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, […]