Vmware

Yes, yes, I know … NSX-V is a little long in the tooth, but there is still a large install base out there. Additionally, it still has general support until 2022-01-16, and I fully expect there to be many customers still using it well after that date. With all of that being considered, I figured I would share this tidbit in the event that it helps someone else. THE PROBLEM Recently, I was fiddling about in my home lab with the intent of testing some NSX-V related alerting with LogInsight. When setting up the syslog server in NSX-V Manager, I came across what appears to be a bug, albeit not documented. In short, if the second part of the FQDN used for a syslog server starts with a digit, you’ll receive the error “Invalid IP or hostname”. ...

A little while back I was playing around with the CDP feature coming in Veeam Backup & Recovery V11. One of the requirements to use it is installing an I/O Filter on your ESXi hosts. The filter is how the magic happens, and there is nothing unusual about this step. Many vendors have I/O Filters available for ESXi . But given that this is a homelab, I tend to do a lot silly things in there. In my case, I found that I was unable to vMotion a VM, which led me down a rabbit hole … ...

Recently I was in a situation where a customer needed to capture esxtop data during a performance impacting event, however the cause of the event was unknown. What this resulted in was hours and hours of testing (e.g. throwing large amounts of traffic & compute load against some VMs), hoping that the event would trigger. There were a few downsides to this approach, most notably: Significant investment in time, most of which was spent watching nothing happen; Not knowing what datapoints we needed to capture to isolate the problem (e.g. host, storage, network, application metrics, etc.)l The risk of missing something during an event (which may last 30 seconds … there is a lot of data to look at in that time, especially if you don’t know what you are looking for). Just like how PING is one of the most useful tools when troubleshooting network issues, esxtop is up there with displaying all sorts of data about your ESXi host, including VM performance and networks stats. ...

I tend to rebuild my home lab a few times a year; sometimes it is to try out a new process (e.g. scripted installs, upgrade paths, etc.), but more often than not it is because I have broken something so bad that it is just easier to restart. As part of that, I usually try to restore some key VMs from backup. However, the bigger struggle there is keeping my backup jobs up to date. ...

Ahh, CDP (Continuous Data Protection) - the feature that everyone has been waiting for. If you’re new to Veeam, or out of the loop, CDP was first announced way back at VeeamON 2017. There’s been a lot of hype about the feature, because in a nutshell it allows you to get RPOs down to a matter of seconds. It is also able to accomplish this without using snapshots. Sadly, it has taken a long time to come to market. The good news is that the Vanguards saw a functional demo of this at the Vanguard Summit recently. ...

Just a quick post today about a feature / configuration within vSphere that some folks may not be aware of. When troubleshooting issues, especially with ESXi hosts, we quite often need to collect log files to pass onto VMware support. Depending on what the issue is, if the affected host(s) crash, then there should also be a coredump. The coredump contains kernel-level details which can significantly help troubleshoot issues. The problem that I have seen some folks run into is with regards to the coredump location. In some cases such as PXE booting, persistent storage may not be available. This means that every time a host is rebooted, the contents of the storage is wiped. If you are writing coredumps to that location, then you’ll lose that valuable data. ...

I recently sat and passed the VCP6-NV exam, and I figured since I spent a lot of time reading about other people’s exam experience, I would share mine as well. An important note is that there are two versions of this exam (as of this writing). The older exam is based on NSX 6 and was retired on April 30, 2017. This is noteworthy because a lot of the study material out there is based on the older exam. The general consensus online seems to be that it won’t hurt to review it, but if newer material is available, you might as well use that. ...

I recall when I first saw Mirage a few years ago. I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. It hasn’t exactly been a popular tool since, which hasn’t helped with folks understanding what it is. At the time I saw it as a bit of a software distribution tool. However, in effect, it is actually more of a backup tool that can restore various points in time to endpoints. ...

When working with VMware Horizon, you’ll find the concept of desktop pools comes up fairly often. Honestly, they aren’t overly complicated to understand. But regardless, it is important to understand what they are, what the different types are, and what options are available. TYPES OF DEKSTOP POOLS When defining a desktop pool, you’ll be able to choose from one of the following three options below. Each type of pool has limitations as to what type of VMs or machines it can use: ...

While studying for my VCP7-DTM exam, I found that there were definitely some core aspects that I had to wrap my head around. I notice that while studying if I hit a stumbling block, I really need to crack it in order to grow. With that in mind, I decided that I wanted to write about a few of those blocks that I ran into. This partially came out of me wanting to understand concepts better. The other, larger part, came from me being too lazy to write a study guide. So, let’s get this going! ...