VMware

Setting a persistant scratch location on a ESXi host

May 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I noticed one of the hosts had a warning saying that: So basically I did what this KB article said: VMware KB article I had a look at another host, and had a look at the Advanced Settings value for: ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation It showed a VMFS volumes /vmfs/volumes/UUID/Scratch folder for that host. So it showed me the UUID such as this: vmfs/volumes/51dda02d-fade5016-8a08-005056171889/HOSTNAME So it looked like there was a folder on this LUN every host! So since I am new to this environment I had to find a way to translate the UUID to the name of the actual SAN datastore being used. I did this by using the: esxcli storage filesystyem list | grep UUID This gave me the actual […]

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vSphere Design Workshop v5.5 Review

May 2, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So after doing all that studying, I thought it was time to delve deeper into the design side of things! Coming with very little design knowledge, I decided to take the official design course. I did a lot of research and read a lot of reviews with regards to the course, as I would be paying for it myself. Point to note every course I have ever been on……I HAVE PAID FOR MYSELF. All the studying has been in my own time, the best any company has done for me is pay for my exam. So when people tell me they don’t have the time, or cant afford it, I call bullshit! It takes sacrifice, all this effort I have put […]

My VCAP5-DCA Experience

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I hope this helps anyone preparing for their VCAP5-DCA or VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam. Preparation: I initially started by going through this guide written by Paul Grevink, working through examples in my lab environment. I’m lucky in that regard as we have a Demo Lab where we get customers in and demonstrate the technology. I look after the lab myself, so I took the opportunity to make sure there weren’t any demo’s coming up and started practicing.   I made sure I had the exam blueprint sitting next to me the whole time and made notes on it as I went along.   After around 3 weeks of solid studying (taking time out between consulting and installs) I found out you […]

Guest Post by Sam Burdett (friend and colleague of Graeme)

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I recently had some trouble upgrading the base esxi image on a vmware host running 6.0.0 so thought I would let you all know how I resolved it as I had the same trouble with other hosts running 5.5.0 Going through the usual process of uploading the iso to update manager and creating the baseline completed without any issues and so I migrated all live VM’s to the other host in the cluster, disabled HA on the host and popped it into maintenance mode. When it came to remediating the update I was however faced with the following problem: Now this is a bit of an ambiguous error, so we need to take a look at the logs to find […]

Adding new blades to a C7000 chassis

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I recently installed some HP ProLiant BL460c blades into a C7000 chassis. First task was to unbox the blades and install the mezzanine cards: The position of your card depends on which slots you’ve populated at the back. There are 8 slots at the back for your networking, whether you’re using ethernet or fibre cards. Make sure you install the mezzanine card into the corresponding slot, in my case it’s into slot 2. Note – because these are only half-height blades, they only have 2 mezzanine slots each. Full-height blades will have 3. Here’s a guide on port mapping: http://virtualkenneth.com/2012/11/26/understanding-hp-virtual-connect-flexfabric-mappings-with-vmware-vsphere/ Please note that your blades will get their iLO settings from the blade chassis Enclosure Bay IP Addressing configuration, which […]

P2V a server that’s isolated from vCenter

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Scenario faced –   My customer has a web server that’s currently hosted in a datacentre. They want to bring this web server in house and use their vSphere platform to host it as a VM, saving around £1000 per month. I have to mention that this is a single web server with no load balancing, it’s an online ordering site that doesn’t experience a high amount of traffic (it’s basically a wholesale ordering site, only certain customers are allowed to buy through it). The server I need to virtualise is in a datacentre, how can I import that into the vSphere environment? There will definitely be downtime, there’s no escaping that. The DC is miles away from the new […]

My VCAP5-DCD Experience

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

The VCAP-DCD550 is a hard exam. I’d go as far as to say the hardest exam I’ve ever done. Basically, unless you’ve actually worked for a VMware reseller as a designer and had hands-on experience installing and maintaining the technology, it will be a very tough slog indeed. However, even with this knowledge and experience, it’s still a difficult exam to master. Part of the challenge is getting your head around all of the terminology, best practices and VMware’s way of design and implementation. It’s been widely acknowledged that the DCD510 version was easier yet longer, as multiple choice was added to the mix and I also believe you couldn’t go back to review a question once you’d clicked “Next”. […]

Adding a second NIC to a VCSA

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Here’s how you add an additional NIC on a VCSA – and I’ll show you step-by-step with actual keyboard commands as no other guides out there do: The VAMI can be accessed via https://(IP or FQDN):5480 – the username is normally root and the default password is vmware Typically this is what you’d see on most standard instances: Adding the additional NIC in vSphere in as easy to do as you’d expect: But you won’t see the additional NIC in the VAMI: It will actually start throwing errors. We need to set add the new NIC manually. To do this, you can either use CLI or YaST2. YaST2 is a SUSE management tool which lets you configure basic elements of […]