Moving from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 Part 1 #Upgrade #Migration #Fresh #vExpert #vSphere #VCSA

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I have been meaning to write a post on this for a while, so I thought I better get started! So let me tell you a story! The Beginning  Now as we all know vSphere 5.5 went EOL a little while ago. So in preparation, I was investigating the various options that were available for the business, to keep them supported. When I first joined the business years ago. it was all a vSphere 5.1 environment that didn’t get patched often and hosts had very very long uptimes. the reason I was brought on board was to get a handle on this and bring it all into line. One of the first jobs was to actually re-ip the whole environment […]

VSAN 6.5 and 6.6.1 resources calculator

November 11, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

The old sheet has been modified to fall in line with the “10.2 Capacity Sizing Example II” of the VMware® vSAN™ Design and Sizing Guide for 6.5 and 6.6.1. You can download the spreadsheet here: https://vmusketeers.com/vsan-6-6-1-resources-calculator/   Kim   ps: If you see errors or have remarks,  feel free to comment.

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Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

Testing vSphere 6.5 DRS – CPU Over Commitment Ratio

November 17, 2016 Kim Bottu 2

The CPU over-commitment ratio also known as the vCPU to pCPU ratio. In this post I will test this new feature of vSphere 6.5 and how it impacts a vSphere 6.5 datacenter design. I am testing this because some of the information about this setting is kind of vague and I want to be sure that I understand how it works and what its impact is on production environments and how it will affect vSphere designs. To be able to test the above mentioned features I have setup a small test environment using 2 nested ESXi hosts, a nested VCSA 6.5 server and a handful of VM’s. The Cluster: 2 hosts HA is disabled DRS is enabled ( because this is a DRS feature!) The hosts: Both hosts have the […]

Emad Younis & Adam Eckerle – The vCenter server and Platform Services Controller Guide to the Galaxy

October 18, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

If you have questions about the deployment of or migration to the VCSA no matter what version, Emad and Adam are probably the guys you want to have a conversation with and the session called ‘The vCenter server and Platform Services Controller Guide to the Galaxy’ should be the first session you should check out at VMworld Barcelona. The right question to ask yourself here is: why would you want to stay with the Windows Server  hosted vCenter server? Because you are used to it and everyone in your department can support it? Because the database administrators know perfectly well how to support Oracle or MSSQL databases but no Postgres? Because the Windows vCenter server historically has supported more features and has […]

What is new in vSphere 6.5 Security?

October 18, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Data security and data privacy are still becoming more and more important. On the flip side of trying to tighten the security layer is that security is becoming vastly harder to manage. VMware’s vision about security is that it has to be easy to manage. This of course applies to traditional applications  as well as cloud native apps, such as VMware’s Photon. Of course in both cases it is mandatory that the infrastructure hosting data, the data itself and the access to data would be always as secure as possible.  vSphere 6.5 Enhanced Logging For years we have been having issues getting the right logs for auditing out of vCenter and ESXi server logs. For example today, vSphere 5.x and vSphere 6.x […]

What is new in vSphere 6.5?

October 18, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

VMworld Las Vegas showed some features of what is about to come in the vSphere 6.5 platform. VMworld Barcelona is no different although I am still crossing my fingers that vSphere 6.5 GA will be announced this week. At the time of writing this blog article it is October 15 and we have had no official statement about vSphere 6.5 yet. I am hoping that VMware will keep the good tradition rolling and will announce the new vSphere platform in Barcelona. After all, in Ray Farrell’s words: “We are not going to go into some of the big advances that are coming in vSphere right now, we are gonna do that at VMworld Barcelona.” So let me introduce you to some […]