Vmware

I recently found myself in the midst of having to setup some VLANs from scratch in an environment that was a hodgepodge of switches. The terms alone between vendors can drive you mad (e.g. access mode vs untagged, dot1q trunk vs. tagged, etc.) Long story short, we got the switches down to either Cisco Catalysts or Cisco Small Business switches. After hopping between switch models enough times, the commands would just get muddled up in my head. Finally, after the umpteenth typo, I made some cheat sheets for myself as I found I was issuing the same commands over and over, but depending on the switch product line, it was slightly different. ...

Recently there has been some talk on Twitter about ‘Making VMUG Great Again’. Along with that, there have been a couple of great blog posts by Alastair Cooke and Eric Siebert, which I recommend you read. I’ve been following the conversation, albeit usually a good 12 hours or so late. https://twitter.com/DemitasseNZ/status/719651965383213056 I wanted to add my $.02 to the topic, but I don’t think Twitter is a great medium for this (largely due to me ‘missing’ the conversations). As a recent first-time co-presenter I was excited to finally be part of a presentation. I have been attending VMUG UserCons for years, and local user group meetings when possible. I have always wanted to contribute back, but I never have until recently. So what changed? In short, I was invited by Rick Vanover to co-present his session. I eagerly accepted. ...

Veeam TOVMUG 2016 Today was the annual Toronto VMUG UserCon. I believe it is the largest VMUG event in the Southern Ontario area. This year I opted to stay over in Toronto last night for two reasons: What is typically a 1-hour drive would be closer to 3 during rush hour and I was asked to co-host the Veeam session, so I didn’t want to be late. It also turned out to be a great decision given how bad the weather was. ...

This morning I was humbled, honoured, and excited to find out that I made the grade to become a vExpert for 2016. I know there are a ton of posts out there with more or less the same first sentence, but I don’t think a lot of posts go much deeper than that. What does it mean to me? Sure, I look forward to some of the potential benefits (I currently personally pay for VMUG Advantage as well as Pluralsight - both because I believe they are quality products), but more than that there are two things that becoming a vExpert means to me: ...

I’ve been a long time user of Veeam, and something that sold me on it almost immediately was its Instant Recovery feature. For those of you who are unaware, Instant Recovery allows you to mount a VM from a backup (while writing changes to a delta file, thus leaving the backups ‘pristine’) without the need to copy the full VM back into production. This means that you’ll get a pretty quick turnaround on recovery - think minutes instead of an hour or more for larger VMs. ...

VMware has been pushing their vCloud product for quite a while now, but the uptake doesn’t seem to be there when compared to other hosted cloud services like AWS and Azure. With the recent addition of vCloud Air to the VMUG Advantage program, I decided to take a look at what it has to offer. I’ve dabbled with some AWS and Google stuff in the past, but I haven’t had the opportunity (or real desire to be honest) to play around with vCA. ...

One of the announcements from the US VMWorld 2015 that I feel hasn’t gotten a lot attention is the VMware Validated Designs. It’s been about a month since the new references were announced on the Office of the CTO blog, but aside from a bit of chatter at VMWorld and a handful of tweets, I haven’t heard much since. The idea behind it intrigues me and I figured what better way to learn about it than write a post about it. So, let’s get started. ...

I recently ran into an interesting error with Veeam, one which I haven’t seen before despite using it for years. The error in question: [Warning] XXXX all stuck VM snapshot consolidation attempts have failed (where XXXX is the VM name). Veeam has been pretty good at removing the snapshots for awhile now, especially since they introduced their Snapshot Hunter feature in v8, so I was a little surprised to see an error such as this. The first thing I did was try and consolidate the snapshots via the vSphere client but I ended up getting the ever so helpful error “An error occurred while consolidating disks: msg.snapshot.error-DISKLOCKED.” Great, at least now I could confirm the disk was being locked by something. ...

A few of months ago I started receiving emails from VMware reminding me that my VCP 5 was going to be expiring. With the changes that were introduced last year, I definitely did not want my certification to expire as it would result in me needing to not only sit two full exams, but to also attend an authorized class again ($$$). Luckily I’m able to take advantage of the Delta exam (2V0-621D) for existing VCPs. It is comparable to the full exam, except it is slimmed down (65 questions) and I believe there are a couple of areas not tested (although I can’t seem to confirm that anywhere online). The Delta exam was offered as a beta for a while, however I ended up not going through with it - mainly because kids are an incredible time sink, and before I knew it the Beta period was wrapping up. ...

With VMWorld 2015 in the books, I thought I would do a sort of round-up post to collect my thoughts and experiences as a whole. I wanted to wait a week or so to let everything soak in and give me time to reflect on the event. Keep in mind that this was my first VMWorld and I’m sure that there was tons that I missed. This is also based on what I was hoping to accomplish going into this, which won’t be the same for everyone. ...