Why I gave up attempting the VCDX

January 14, 2017 Graeme Vermeulen 2

Note: I’d like to preface this post by stating that I have utmost respect for any individual who’s achieved VCDX-level certification or is in the process of doing so. I wrote this post here a while ago on why I will become a VCDX, and why it’s worth it.  I feel that I need to write this post out, if anything, for myself so that I can finally move on from the VCDX and not feel so guilty about dropping it! I’ve been working in the background on a design to submit, despite having a very busy life with my fair share of issues to deal with, all the while still doing my usual day job of consulting. I’ve really found that […]

VCAP6-DCV Design Objective 1.1 on the #vBrownbag

January 12, 2017 Jason Grierson 1

The other week I saw the call to all VCDX volunteers for the vBrownbag series around the new VCAP6-DCV Design exam, so with exam closet to my heart I have volunteered for a few sections.  The first section I really wanted to cover was the Objective 1.1 as this was one of the sections that I really struggled with when I wrote the DCD 5.1/5.5 exam, however the due date didn’t leave me much time to prep a presentation deck.  So over the weekend I gave it the good old college try but was only able to get half way through the presentation due to the length of the chapter.  With that in mind I messaged Gregg letting him know […]

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8.1 Unable to Export Recovery Plan History

January 10, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 1

Basically, I had a recovery plan and I had done tests/cleanups/migrations/re-protects and it all worked exactly as expected,. But each time when I wanted to export the history reports it wouldn’t do anything! I would pick the type of report I wanted (html/doc etc), I would click generate report. It would generate it fine. But when I clicked download…I would get nothing. I click it and click it and nothing would happen?! I tried Chrome and Firefox, I had rebooted the SRM  service at both sites, the Web Client service at both sites. I had tried a different user account, I simply could not get the report to export. But every other plan exported fine. Then I was asking in the […]

WARNING: Veeam Backup VDDK error 1 and 2 ESXi 5.5/6 Veeam B&R v8/9 Updated: 03/01/2017

January 3, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So this has been an ongoing saga for quite a while: Repeated VDDK error 1 and 2 This is an issue I blogged about a little while ago too, right here: WARNING: Veeam Backup VDDK error 1 and 2 ESXi 5.5/6 Veeam B&R v8/9 It has been causing people plenty of issues and although it’s simple to fix, it’s annoying and it shouldn’t be happening! Veeam and VMware have been pointing the finger at each other for months now. Personally I would lean to it being a VMware issue, simply because a restart of the management agents resolves the issue. So I have been following the thread on the Veeam forums and there has finally been an update! VMware have […]

Manny Sidhu joins our merry band of vMusketeers

December 27, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

We are delighted to announce that Manny Sidhu is joining vMusketeers! Manny currently works from Melbourne Australia, has been a vEXPERT for the last 3 years and has been announced as a vEXPERT NSX for 2016.  Like the rest of us he is a huge fan of VMware , virtualization and a certification junkie. Thanks for joining our merry band of vMusketeers Manny!

Upgrading vSphere Web Client due to Fix Security Issue CVE-2015-2342 5.5u3b

December 13, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

These are the steps I took to apply this fix: First thing I did is I took a Veeam backup of the VM, then I copied over the files as downloaded from: Additional patch for security issue CVE-2015-2342 for vCenter Server 5.x on Windows (2144428) I did a md5 check Opened Command Prompt as administrator, and navigated to the folder where I had extracted the script and ran: cscript JMXScript5.<x>.vbs “<location_of_wrapper.conf_file>” cscript JMXScript5.5.vbs “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vShereWebClient\server\bin\service\conf\wrapper.conf” Since I was running 5.5u3b, I already had a partial fix so it was just a matter of running the script to fully patch it. The script stops the web service, does it business and restarts the web service again. This takes about a minute or so. The […]

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Configuring/Creating Custom Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 (SRM) Alarms

December 6, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

Configuring the alarms isn’t all that easy and not documented that well. In the vExpert slack I was chatting to @railroadmanuk Tim as he was trying to configure up some alarms, and this is something I have been meaning to dig into more myself. He started me off in the right direction telling me he configures them from the vCenter server alerts. So, vCenter Server > Manage > Alarm Definitions and from here you create a new alarm. I needed to create an alarm for when a new VM is put onto a replicated datastore and an alarm when a currently protected VM has been configured in a way, which would impact its protection status (eg new VMDK on a non replicated datastore […]

Testing vSphere 6.5 DRS – CPU Over Commitment Ratio

November 17, 2016 Kim Bottu 2

The CPU over-commitment ratio also known as the vCPU to pCPU ratio. In this post I will test this new feature of vSphere 6.5 and how it impacts a vSphere 6.5 datacenter design. I am testing this because some of the information about this setting is kind of vague and I want to be sure that I understand how it works and what its impact is on production environments and how it will affect vSphere designs. To be able to test the above mentioned features I have setup a small test environment using 2 nested ESXi hosts, a nested VCSA 6.5 server and a handful of VM’s. The Cluster: 2 hosts HA is disabled DRS is enabled ( because this is a DRS feature!) The hosts: Both hosts have the […]