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 […]

ERROR vCenter 5.5U2 upgrade to vCenter 6.0U2a: 1603, A change must be made to this systems time and many others

March 3, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Recently I had several problems upgrading vCenter server 5.5U2 to vCenter server 6.0U2a. Luckily all has been solved now and I owe a huge thank you to  Ciaran McE from VMware Support who has stood by me and helped me to solve this vCenter upgrade problem. Below I am listing a handful of the errors we have seen, how you can spot them and how you can solve them. Error 1: Error 1603. Because SSO appeared to be somehow corrupt [As a test to check if SSO was intact I deleted of a local SSO group resulted in the unavailability of SSO as a whole], I had to install a new external SSO server,  remove and reinstall vCenter server and re-point […]

HPE TSS, Cannes 2017 – Day 1 and 2

February 15, 2017 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I’ve had the privilege of being invited to the Tech Summit run by HPE. The venue this year – Cannes. It’s the same venue that the film festivals run from, so naturally, a lot of local speakers have expressed humility and gratitude to be standing on such a prestigious stage – the Grand Auditorium here at Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes. I’m here with my colleague, Rich Dunthorne. Rich runs the presales function at AN and is well known for his ability to get his hands dirty when necessary – some might say he even enjoys it! Well firstly, the security at this gig is tight. It definitely feels like we’re celebrities being herded around wearing badges […]

Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 SRM and VR Protection Advanced Settings Riddle

February 7, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

When you use SRM (in my case SRM version 5.8.1) in combination with VR to protect your VMs, SRM will own these VMs. You will not be able to recover these protected VMs using vSphere Replication on its own, as long as they are SRM protected.  This became an issue for us, simply because we had an issue where the SRM service would fail to start at the DR site. Working with VMware support we got it working again but neither VMware Support or myself really knew what the root cause was. A little SRA and SRM history We are using SRM in combination with SRA’s and had a Recovery Plan that was stuck in partial re-protect mode and no amount […]

vSphere Replication when using vRDMS

January 31, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 2

So you can use vRDMs with vSphere Replication: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/07/vsphere-replication-virtual-rdm.html There aren’t many use cases for it and it isn’t documented very well. So I have just been pondering over something: vSphere replication supports VMs that have vRDMs but not pRDMs. ESXi5.5 now supports vRDMs up to 62TB. What it does, is it will bring the vRDM up as a VMDK file at the DR site. I am throwing this out there as a possible option for replication of our VMs that have RDMs attached, since we have a few VMs that have RDMs attached to them and which need to be replicated too. “If you wish to maintain the use of a virtual RDM at the target location, it is possible to […]