VMware

Can’t login using Windows Session Credentials – VCSA (vSphere 6)

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Quite a few things seem to have changed with the VCSA in vSphere 6. The most obvious change is that the appliance is no longer deployed as an OVA / OVF template but rather from an ISO image. As part of deploying the ISO, you’ll be prompted to put in your settings for the vCenter before it’s even powered on. This can be quite tricky to get right the first time – so make sure you have created the relevant DNS records on your DNS servers and configured your VM network on the chosen host for initial deployment. Setting up SSO for your Windows Domain is exactly the same, however when ticking the “Use Windows Session Credentials” box you will […]

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Resetting a lost ESXi 5.1 root password on a Dell R710

April 15, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I found out that no one new the root password to a host in one of the clusters. So I tried various things to no avail: Had a look in the documentation for it (What it was supposed to be, it wasn’t that) Checked if the keyboard layout was correct (it was) I tried the Host Profiles trick to reset the password to what you want (it didn’t work for some strange reason). It took the profile and applied it and everything, but the password persisted! Reset root using host profiles Reset root using host profile in Web Client Tried 2 Linux live cds and it turns out none of them work with Dell servers in general, due to driver […]

So I passed my VCAP5-DCA back in January 2015!

February 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

Here is a breakdown of how it went and what I did, so if anyone else is considering doing it here ya go! At the time I worked for a Managed Services/DR/BC company so we had a lot of kit sat idle at times, which was free to use for labs! I had a lab setup at work as follows: 5x DL380 g7 in 2 clusters 14TB IBM DS4700 FC SAN 8TB IBM  DS3300 iSCSI SAN Some local storage in each server Windows Server 2008 which ran vCenter and the client ( I installed teamviewer on this pc so I could login from anywhere on my laptop). No AD setup. I had vmotion and iSCSI traffic in one vlan and FT […]

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Many Cores per Socket or Single-Core Socket Mystery

May 11, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 3

Hi All During some readings, I remembered the eternal debatable Question when creating SMP VM (VM with many vCPUs): “Which is better: many Cores in a single socket or many Sockets each with single core..??” I remember how many times I debated for hours with my technical manager -while reviewing some designs- about the same question, but neither of us could prove a bit. To answer this question, we have to review some concepts: NUMA CPU Configuration: Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is a CPUs configuration, in which each CPU has some Memory DIMMs local and connected to it. Each CPU can access both its local memory DIMMs with lowest latency and the remote DIMMs with higher latency using Interconnecting […]

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Swap to Host Cache (wrongly aka. Swap to SSD)

January 18, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 2

Hi All … vSphere 5.0 and later came with so many enhancement for Virtual Infrastructure and Swap to Host Cache is one of these. This feature allows you to use any SSD datastore -some or all of it- as Write-back Cache to swap to it ESXi memory pages in case of Hard State memory contention. Many of vExperts wrote about it and its technical how-to configuration, like Duncan Epping in his complete-guide blog post here. Now, you’re asking: “So, why do you write this blog post?? Do you wanna to copy-paste??!”  The answer is unfortunately, NO!! I write this blog post to answer a question that may come to your mind while reading about this awesome feature: “What is the […]