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 […]

How to get some free IT training resources?

June 13, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

IT courses can cost quite a bit of money. If you are like me and want to have more training than your company’s training budget allows you, you might want to have a look at how you can get some free training under your belt. Free training can come from anywhere really, be that ebooks, books, onsite learning platforms or online lab, you just have to look for it and make your pick. Some even come with free certificates of completion. At the bottom you can find my personal  favorite picks. But let me give you some learning possibilities which you probably have not considered yet and let me start with the most unobvious ones: How to become a technical reviewer of a […]

VMworld 2017 Barcelona – Are you going?

June 12, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

A couple of weeks ago I received some very pleasant news in my inbox:  “VMworld Blogger Pass, Barcelona – YOU’RE GOING!” This is the second year VMware bestows this honor on me and I am feeling as happy and honored as I felt last year. Just like last year, I had to read the email a couple of time before I was able to believe the subject of the email. *grin* Of course a free conference ticket only takes you that far. I have to extend my gratitude also to my managers who recognize the value of all the technical sessions at VMworld and who sponsor all my other costs. You guys rock! So what is this VMworld I am writing about? I have always seen VMworld […]

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 […]

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 […]

My CompTIA Cloud SME experience

April 24, 2017 Graeme Vermeulen 2

Well it’s been just over 2 weeks since I got back from Chicago where I was with CompTIA at their worldwide headquarters. As a long-time exam-taker, I’ve sat a lot of exams. You see, when you choose a career in IT, the learning never stops. It’s not really comparable to any other profession (well, you’re probably always learning, but not to the point where if you stop learning you risk becoming redundant!) in this regard. I mean just look around you and you’ll see how far the world has come technologically. Technology advances so quickly that Apple feels they need to release a new iPhone every 6 months, and other companies are busy testing driverless cars in California. There are rumours everywhere […]

VCAP-DCV Design vBrownbag Section 2.4

March 29, 2017 Jason Grierson 0

Hello, The other day I had the pleasure of taking part in another vBrownbag in the VCAP-DCV Design series with Ron Wedel covering Objective 2.4 – Build Manageability Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design This chapter has a lot of great information in it around proper design methodology in the Management silo of APMRS (Availability, Performance, Manageability, Recover-ability, and Security) however it sometimes doesn’t really point you towards exactly what the exam will be asking of you.  So in this session we covered what the exam will ask of you in objective 2.4 and how objective 2.4 prepares you for your VCDX journey around designing Manageability. Below is the slide deck used in the presentation and the link the […]

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 […]