REVIEW: Learning VMware NSX Book by Ranjit Singh Thakurratan

July 11, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This book is one of the first books about VMware NSX 6.2. Being to the point and not too big a book, this book is really one of the resources you should have in your library if you’re using VMware NSX. Let us have a quick look at the book contents This book has nine chapters: Chapter 1: An introduction into Network Virtualization concepts and NSX-V. It also includes the only current (albeit inofficial) reference for NSX 6.2 Configuration Maximums. Chapter 2: An introduction into NSX components which is a simple and smooth entrance to the world of VMware NSX. This includes also a good explanation of the VXLAN concepts. It also gives an overview of the much anticipated new feature: Cross-vCenter NSX. Chapter 3: This chapter explains […]

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REVIEW: VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook – Second Edition

July 5, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

Whether you are a seasoned architect who still is getting familiar with vSphere 6 or a hands-on engineer who likes to get a firmer grip on design and architecture using vSphere 6, Hersey’s updated datacenter cookbook just might be just the book you need. This book graciously keeps a good balance between datacenter design principles, best practices and howto’s. In this book Hersey takes you by the hand and guides you through the steps needed to create a virtual datacenter design using vSphere 6. Besides the necessary theoretical explanations Hersey offers his readers 75 recipes which they can use to help with the creation or optimization of a  virtual datacenter design: What are the prerequisites you need for a design? […]

vCNS 5.5 to NSX 6.2.3 upgrade – vCenter Lookup Not connecting

June 29, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

Yesterday I performed a vCNS 5.5 upgrade to NSX 6.2.3. I did run into issues later on the day thanks to NTP, there is a small gotcha here even if you had set it up correctly! The environment: vCenter 5.5 VCSA + embedded SSO ESXi 5.5 vCNS 5.5 ( vShield Manager + vShield APP Firewalls) some VMs ( including DHCP and Domain Controller) NTP running from a Windows Server   Performing the upgrade of vCNS is pretty straight forward:   Download the NSX upgrade package: VMware-vShield-Manager-upgrade-bundle-to-NSX-6.2.3-3979471.tar.gz. Open the vCNS vShield Manager Go to Updates and Upload Upgrade Bundle After the upgrade you might end up with a web interface which looks like a mix of vCNS and NSX. Flush the […]

REVIEW: Architecting EUC Solutions

June 26, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Each year I order a couple of books even though I have no idea if they will be books which contain content I can actually use. The reasons to buy these books varies: The title might look promising, there is a lot of buzz about a book or it can be as plain and simple as me liking the cover of a book. Brian Suhr’s book belongs to the first category, the title looked promising. Such a strategy can result in picking bad books of course.                 This book is not a book that does not deliver though. After having read Architecting EUC Solutions I would say this book is quite the opposite to me, an EUC compendium ‘par […]

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IT Architect: Foundation in the Art of Infrastructure Design Review

June 15, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 3

I picked up a copy of this book pretty much as soon as it was released. Most architects I’ve spoken to have recommended this book, so I didn’t want to miss it! Where to start. First impressions The book gets off to a running start, there is no build-up towards hitting you with some great knowledge (the authors have also managed to get a number of VCDXs to answer the question “what is infrastructure design?”). You’ll get stuck in right from the beginning regarding how you should approach solutions design, from the various stages (such as discovery, design, build etc.), design methodologies straight through to really useful case studies. It’s really quite difficult to get this amount of technical information through across […]

VSAN 6.2 Online resource calculator

June 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Hello All! Yes, this is an Online Excel sheet to calculate how many hosts, storage, physical CPU’s, virtual CPU’s, RAM, Cache and so on you need. I still need to add the bits and pieces to calculate the amount of components, disks and disk groups which are needed to serve all workloads, but I figured this might already be useful to some. I am human, so mistakes happen, so if you spot any mistakes or omissions, please let us know. You can find the online excel table at the bottom and fields can be modified. Contrary to the VSAN 6.0 calculator I have decided not to show the whole table but only the boxes you have to fill in and the results. To see […]

REVIEW: Pluralsight – Overview of TOGAF® 9.1

June 7, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

For quite some time now I have set my eyes on getting TOGAF certified. Not that I think that getting TOGAF certified instantaneously will make anyone an Enterprise Architect, but it would definitely proof that someone (in this case me, myself and I) has some insights into where enterprises and architecture meet. Yes this includes IT infrastructure as well! Discovering the right literature was rather easy. The Opengroup not only sells its own books to help you get TOGAF certified, but also is friendly enough to offer a digital version free of charge on the internet. Finding good video courses proved to be a lot harder.   PuralSight – Overview of the TOGAF® 9.1 Enterprise Architecture Framework, by Joseph Anthony For anyone who has no idea what TOGAF and/or […]

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

June 7, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 4

Also read the follow up post: VeeAM Backup VDDK error Follow-up and solution So recently I came across a strange problem. Random VMs from various different jobs, would fail to back up, I would get a VDDK error. Now the last time I had this error, was when I had just joined a company and it turned out to be a faulty disk on a local host that had failed,  and it had been in a failed state for so long that the whole vdisk on the Dell host was compromised and I had a punctured RAID. There was no monitoring in place! rest assured that’s sorted now. But these were all SAN based, on different datastores and on different SANs. […]