#VMUG Presentations @scottishvmug @nwenglandvmug @VirtualG_UK @vBeeGee

April 5, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

For a long while I have been pondering doing some kind of presentation at some VMUGs. They VMUG leaders have cornered me a few times to actually present, so finally I decided to do it and to pick some topics that I thought might be interesting. Since I have decided this year is going to me focusing on my presentation/soft skills, I thought presenting at VMUGs would be a good way to build up on that skill set and to help me along in my toastmasters journey. If it wasn’t for the community and the people I have met as a result, I wouldn’t be where I am at the moment, as with many things in life it is a […]

Presentations and Public Speaking #Toastmasters #publicspeaking #IceBreaker @LeedsSpeaking @Toastmasters

March 26, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

Ever since I did my VCDX I have seen the value of public speaking and the power of having good soft skills. As many people reading this will be working in the IT area, we spend most of our days in front of a computer screen and the IT world seems to attract its fair share of introverts. Now what I have learnt is that you can have all the ace technical skills in the world, but if you are unable to communicate all this info in a effective way you leave yourself at a massive disadvantage! See the VCDX submission is your technical documentation and it gets you to the dance, but the presentation and workshop skills are what […]

Dell Compellent 5020 Commissioning

March 7, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So where I am working currently they are a heavy Compellent shop. Let me give you some of the back story We have multiple SC8000s spread across 2 sites. These were specced up years ago (before my time), and are now reaching EOL. One SC8000 was reaching EOL and no one let the company know, which was a big slip up by Dell. Because the original SC8000 was an upgrade from the old White box controllers Comepllent used to use, all the disks and enclosures carried over. But the issue was that these were THAT old, that support was falling off for them, and that meant that a good chunk on the disks on that SAN were now going EOL. […]

NSX-T 2.4 – Unprecedented Enhancements

February 28, 2019 Manny Sidhu 0

NSX-T 2.4 was released about 16 hours ago when VMware’s NSBU put this blog post out. Some pretty cool enhancements to NSX-T in this release have been introduced with some of the key ones being around application-centric SDN, Ansible orchestration, API consumption, data visualization and security, Day 2 and beyond operations (upgrades, troubleshooting and migration). IMO, this brings T just about at-par with V, probably surpasses it. The version isn’t GA by the looks of it, since there isn’t a download available just yet: I took about an hour and a bit to run through what’s available to learn up about this major release and here it is for your easy reading: Increased manageability: A converged appliance cluster that slices […]

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 […]

Why you should attend your local VMUG User Conference

January 25, 2019 Manny Sidhu 0

The local VMUG User Conference is fast approaching (March 21, save the date!), preparation’s in full swing and the VMUG leaders are working hard to make the event a success. While I can’t tell you the agenda just yet because it’s being finalized, what’s public information is the fact people of the likes of Brian Madden, Chris Wolf and Cody de Arkland will be there to present keynotes and a session or two. That’s reason enough to be there! The event’s free too in case you didn’t know. So head on over to the registration page here for the Melbourne chapter of the conference. Now why else should you attend the conference? Learn something outside your daily job. Maybe you’ve […]