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REVIEW: Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition

June 6, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

On Friday my pre-order of Duncan Epping’s and Cormac Hogan’s updated book for VSAN was finally available for download. A few clicks on the website of PearsonITcertification and I was ready to start reading. I took the whole weekend to read this book. The structure of the book: The books reads very pleasantly mostly because it has been well structured, and despite the technical nature of the content of this book (of course this is why we buy it), it is easy to follow. ‘Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition’ contains ten chapters: Introduction to VSAN VSAN Prerequisites and Requirements for Deployment VSAN Installation and Configuration VM Storage Policies on VSAN Architectural Details VM Storage Policies and Virtual Machine Provisioning Management and Maintenance Stretched Cluster Designing […]

VMAX3 with Solutions Enabler and vSphere SRM 6.0 Configuration Guide

June 5, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Last weekend, I was engaged by one of our biggest clients, a bank, to upgrade its virtual infrastructure to vSphere 6 and to migrate their infrastructure to new VMAX 3 storage arrays in both main and DR site. It’s one of only two customers in Egypt that uses vSphere SRM with VMAX Arrays for DR purposes. VMAX3 Arrays are enterprise-level arrays from EMC. They’re the descendant of the great Symmetrix Arrays and they use their own replication engine, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF). To manage SRDF and integrate it with any other solution for DR Automation and Management, it requires a software component called Solutions Enabler (SE). This software consists of a client and a server component. SE server is either installed on a […]

PowerCLI: the easiest way to create Private VLANS

May 26, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

If you like to test PVLANs but don’t like clicking around in the webclient, try creating them from PowerCLI. The Primary VLAN in each line is always the same one and in your first line, the primary and the secondary VLAN are the same VLAN. This is because the primary PVLAN will also serve as the Pormiscuous PVLAN. I have chosen 200. On the next lines the Primary and Secondary VLANs are different from eachother. $vds = Get-VDSwitch ‘Your vDS’ Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 200 -PrivateVlanType Promiscuous Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 201 -PrivateVlanType Community Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 203 -PrivateVlanType Isolated

Book Review: Networking for VMware Administrators

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been collecting lots of books ever since I started on my journey of doing my VCAPs. One book time and again has been my go to reference for absolutely anything VMware networking related….and you guessed it…IT’S THIS BOOK! When I have been in chats with networking guys, and we have been discussing various features, I can point them to sections of the book, and if I need to confirm something I can double check it quickly. You do not need to be a networking guru to use this book. I have/had a CCNA (it has expired), so I have a fair idea, but I am by no means a networking guru and I have learnt plenty from […]

Book Review: VMware vSphere Troubleshooting PACKT Publishing

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would start writing reviews on them. I just bought this one, one thing I like is that you get the pdf instantly and the physical copy comes in about 5 days. So I can access it instantly while waiting for my physical copy to turn up. I have read through most of it, it is split up into the following chapters: The Methodology of Problem Solving Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM Performance Troubleshooting Clusters Monitoring and Troubleshooting Networking Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage Advanced Troubleshooting of vCenter Server and vSphere Hosts Appendix A: Learning PowerGUI Basics Appendix B: Installing VMware vRealize Operations […]

Book Review: VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook PACKT Publishing

May 26, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

As I have stated before I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would write another review on one of the many books I own from them. This book is by far one of the best books on VMware vSphere Design that is available, it was one of the key books in my study towards the VCAP5-DCD and it was one of the main reasons I passed the exam. It is broken down into multiple chapters: The Virtual Datacenter The Discovery Process The Design Factors The vSphere Management Design The vSphere Storage Design The vSphere Network Design The vSphere Compute Design The vSphere Physical Design The Virtual Machine Design Disaster Recovery […]

VMware vSphere PERFORMANCE Book Review

May 25, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 1

I have had this book for a while and it’s the only Sybex book I have! So I thought it deserved a review. The book is split up into the following Chapters: Performance Design Building Your Toolbox The Test Lab CPU Memory Network Storage Chapter 1: This goes into detail about establishing good baselines for the various aspects of the environment. You can spurt out lots of figures, but if you don’t have a baseline that has been compiled over some time, how do you know if the current stats you are seeing are good or bad? Also it goes into design considerations and mentions the impact of scaling up or scaling out, but also points out that […]

The death of an icon – literally

May 18, 2016 Don Ward 2

As I type this we are about to go to a special WebEx meeting for vExperts only but by the time you read this; VMware would have announced this on their blog and the gag can come off! So after enduring a huge amount of pain due to typical conference call pings/rings/background noise we eventually got down to business. The meeting is basically telling us we are going to get a new GUI to manage VMware estates however there can be only one (cue Highlander movie MEME). What does this mean? Well it means: VMware are no longer offering C sharp client (VI CLIENT) in the next release of vSphere So what is the low down and why did VMware […]