What is new with VMware?

October 15, 2016 Kim Bottu 2

VMworld Barcelona 2016 is finally here! How we – the ones who didn’t make it to VMworld Las Vegas – have all been counting down to this marvelous week in Spain where the weather at the time of writing this article is much better than in Belgium where a grey sky and sizzling temperatures of about 8 degrees Celsius keep me comfort (cough – cough). We did receive a lot of great news from the VMworld Las Vegas conference. For instance, it is obvious now that VSAN is here to stay and is very quickly becoming the number one for hyper converged infrastructure. Where I had doubt about the solution capabilities of VSAN 5.5 these doubts have started fading rapidly with the introduction […]

VMworld Barcelona – Pre-conference post

September 19, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

If you are among the lucky ones who like me are heading out to VMworld Barcelona in a couple of weeks, I hope you are as excited about this year’s edition as I am. This year more so than last year is the year where VMware makes a statement that it is still one of the big players and after having watched the general sessions of VMworld 2016 Las Vegas and having browsed through the VMworld 2016 content catalog I have to agree, this year will be epic! Barcelona is one of the most fascinating cities in the world. It is the city where you can admire the architectural masterpieces designed by Gaudi, the hometown of FC Barcelona, a place where good food never is far away and to me the host […]

VMware Horizon VIEW: No desktops available after adding a new connection broker with the same name but different IP

September 15, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

For anyone working with Horizon View the following screen shouldn’t be to unfamiliar. “This desktop has no desktop sources available.” It happens to all of us  and mostly the error is caused by common issues which are easily tracked and solved: We might have forgotten to create enough desktops for the amount of concurrent users. The View agent which has been installed might be having errors. There might be customization issues. Click the top link to see more examples in the VMware KB.   The VDI test environment: To give you a better idea of my test environment, I have a master connection server, a replica server and a security server. The master connection server has been used to create a relation with the security server. […]

The Host Virtual MAC Address Riddle

September 5, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 1

For ages I have been pondering over ‘something’ which seems very trivial and the fact I can’t get any solid info on it is driving me nuts: Why does every pNIC also have a virtual MAC address? So here with have the VMkernel ports, a VSS and pNICS: Just as you would expect, every physical NIC (pNIC) on a host has a MAC address. BUT when you type ‘esxcfg-info -n‘ in the shell, you will notice that every vmnic also has a Virtual MAC Address!   \==+Physical Nic : |—-Name…………………………………………..vmnic3 |—-PCI Segment…………………………………….0 |—-PCI Bus………………………………………..2 |—-PCI Slot……………………………………….0 |—-PCI function……………………………………1 |—-MAC Address…………………………………….XX:XX:XX:32:06:1f |—-Virtual MAC Address……………………………..00:50:56:52:06:1f |—-FPT Shareable………………………………..true Now as you can see the Virtual MAC Address starts off with a VMware MAC and then finishes at the […]

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Journey to VCIX-NV – Part 4 – DLR Control VM SSH Access

August 25, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

So, in this this stage I wanted to test the Distributed Logical Router (DLR) setup. The DLR is one of two types of routers available in NSX Platform and is mainly used in East-West traffic routing to avoid the traffic hair-pinning which can occur in normal centralized routing. For more info, check Roie ben Haim‘s marvelous article about the DLR here. The DLR consists mainly of two components: The Control VM (CVM) which is an Edge Services Gateway (ESG) built specifically to handle routing. Like any normal physical router, this is the SUP module that does all routing stuff (calculating routes and neighboring) and owns the routing tables. tThe CVM isn’t a part of the Data path. The Kernel modules in the ESXi Hosts: This module does […]

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Journey to VCIX-NV – Part 3 – Transport Zones, Clusters and Distributed Switches: Relation and Design Aspects

August 22, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

At this point, I started deploying the basic block of any NSX implementation: Logical Switches. Logical Switches are deployed as a virtual distributed port group on your vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS). Logical Switches are deployed within a logical entity called Transport Zone. This Transport Zone can span one or more clusters and single host can’t be added to the Transport Zone. Couple of thoughts jumped to my mind: what is the limit of a Transport Zone? and How does it represent a logical boundary for your NSX implementation? What is the relation between it and both of added clusters and the vDS(es) in the environment? How do all of that affect my design any NSX implementations? To answer my thoughts together, let’s […]

Questions from Gregg Robertson VCDX #205

August 18, 2016 vReid 0

Following my VCDX certification I was asked by Gregg AKA TheSaffaGeek to answer some questions for his blog.   How did you get into using VMware? I started back in 2009 when my previous employer started a large datacentre consolidation project. I quickly did my VCP to ensure I was the main resource on the project.   What made you decide to do the VCDX? I really wanted to further my knowledge after doing the VCAPs. What I liked about the VCDX program is it makes you stronger in so many different technology areas.   How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey? About 13 months once I had passed the VCAP’s.   What advice would […]

VCAP6-DCV Design – Download Blueprint

August 17, 2016 Kim Bottu 4

The official VCAP-6-DCV Design Blueprint is available but unfortunately there is no download link for a PDF version yet. So I have created an excel sheet containing the same content as the online blueprint which you can download from this website. <<CLICK HERE>> to download the Excel version of the VCAP6-DCV Design blueprint.