Practical VMware vSphere guides for ESXi, vCenter, PowerCLI, networking, storage, lifecycle management, automation, and production troubleshooting.
I recently had the pleasure of upgrading one of my older environments running VMware vCenter 6.5 U2 to vCenter 6.7 U3 and thought i would share my experience. I know a lot of people who are planning for this upgrade by the end of the year so I hope this helps everyone out. If you … Explore: Upgrade of VMware vCenter 6.5 U2 to vCenter…
This past Friday was the annual Dallas Fort Worth UserCon where VMware people come together to share experiences, hear speakers, and connect. I particularly enjoy coming to VMUG events for all the new connections I am able to make. I was sharing a couple of my experiences with a great guy in Ariel Sanchez who … Explore: VMUG Where We All Connect
Apparently, people like blog articles on exam prep because I have been requested to write this article. I felt the VMConAWS exam was more than fair and straight forward. There aren’t any questions on the exam meant to stump the chump. I would say 6 months VMConAWS hands on experience & you should be more … Explore: VMware Cloud on AWS – Software Defined Data…
I received a lot of feedback from my last certification exam review blog so I thought I would write one for my 6.7 vSAN Specialist. I will be the first to admit that I thought this exam was very straight forward and was truely testing your knowledge of vSAN. I will also admit I did … Explore: VMware vSAN 6.7 2019 Specialist (5V0-21.19) Exam Prep
Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for “advice” on how to re-deploy VxRail. Apparently, the 13G server line and older G-Series appliances still have a use when upgrading to 14G hardware. Lab environment for staging a like for like Production environment to test out code updates, POCs, and anything else you desire … Explore: How to Perform VxRail 4.7 Cluster Install
Last week I was on a reference call in regards to VxRail. I was asked many questions but one surprising question was, “How difficult is it to add storage?” I thought I would write a quick article to show just how it is done.In a regular vSAN cluster you would need to add the drives, … Explore: VxRail – Add drives to Cluster
In the last couple of weeks I have had to perform a few VxRail upgrades to particular code levels. As many of you know this requires downloading the particular code bundle IE 4.5.229 and performing a local upgrade. However, on two separate clusters in two separate datacenters I noticed that the bundle upload was taking … Explore: VxRail Composite Bundle taking abnormal amount of time…
Every so often I will get the question, “I need to log into the iDRAC on Host X, do you have it’s IP.” I thought I would put together this quick article with the command to provide this information. StepsIssue the following command from the ESXi host you are attempting to gather the iDRAC IP … Explore: How to Discover iDRAC IP on VxRail Node
From time to time you may encounter an error where your VxRail node goes into a device missing state in VxRail manager but is operating normally in vCenter. The main culprit behind this is typically the PTAgent. The PTAgent exists to poll hardware information on a node every few minutes using ipmi. Assuming there isn’t … Explore: VxRail PTAgent Troubleshooting – Device Missing State
Prepare and perform a VxRail 4.7 RASR factory reset with data-loss warnings, prerequisites, legacy boot steps, troubleshooting, and post-reset recovery checks.
There are instances where you may need to remove a node from your VxRail cluster. One instance may be moving the host from one cluster to another (ensure host is at same code level as the new cluster). Another instance you may be you are wanting to shrink a large cluster into two smaller manageable … Explore: How to remove a VxRail 4.7 Node from…
Lately, I have had people messaging asking to help them troubleshoot their environment. Everything from random performance impacts to my SQL DBA says I have a disk IO issue. I thought I would take the time to post a few helpful ruby shell commands I use to help me keep an eye on my own … Explore: Useful Ruby Shell vSAN Commands
Quick answer: distributed switch versus port group A vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) is the datacenter-level switch configuration that vCenter Server applies consistently across multiple ESXi hosts. A distributed port group is a policy-defined set of ports on that switch for a specific network or traffic type. Create the vDS first, create and validate its port … Explore: Create a vSphere Distributed Switch and Port Groups
It feels like I cannot go a week without being asked the question of, “What is my real capacity on vSAN/VxRail?” Followed by we just cannot get our capacity planning correct and we are determining how much more capacity to grow our cluster by. I thought I would perform a back to basic vSAN math … Explore: VxRail / vSAN Capacity Math Made Easy
This is my fourth and final installment of this series. These steps were taken by me to failover and failback multi-million dollar datacenters in as easy as 4-clicks. At this point we should have our SDDC deployed and linked back to our onprem. VR/SRM should be deployed both onprem and in the SDDC. All site … Explore: Part 4. DRaaS – The four click failover…
Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions around how to build vSAN for high performing workloads. This article is intended to cover hardware differences, slack space, what is vSAN namespace, object, component, Raid-1 vs Raid-5/6, and stripe width, which all can impact performance. Please keep in mind I am not covering dedup/compression overhead … Explore: Performance Tuning your vSAN / VxRail Environment
I wanted to cover real quick creating a custom storage policy on vSAN, which even on a VxRail is done in vCenter. House keeping items:Raid 1 mirror is where you write a complete replica of the object. This is the highest performance protection you can apply to an object. Since it is a complete replica … Explore: Create a new vSAN Storage Policy in vSphere…
In my previous article I showed everyone how to install the latest vCenter 6.5 U2d. Now I will show how to upgrade your existing vCenter to 6.5 U2b and why created new vCenter’s with embedded Platform Services Controllers will make upgrades even easier. Before we begin, always remember to take a snapshot before upgrading any … Explore: Upgrade vCenter with external PSC to 6.5 U2b
As we are all aware vCenter is at the heart of our vSphere environments. Whether deploying a lab or a net new datacenter with vSAN/VxRail, you will require a new vCenter. Before I begin, embedded vs external Platform Services Controller (PSC). I say treat any net new install as embedded PSC only. VMware is in … Explore: How to Install a vCenter (VCSA) 6.5 U2d
This is the third installment of my ongoing series on DRaaS. We have have by now installed VR/Site Recovery Manager, configured site pairings, and configured onprem and SDDC mappings. Now it is time to setup Replication, Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. What are Protection Groups and Recovery Plans A protection group is a group of … Explore: Part 3. DRaaS on VMWare Cloud on AWS…
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