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. ...

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. ...

Yesterday, VMware unveiled its vExpert Pro program. For those of you who aren’t aware, VMware runs a program called vExpert. Despite its name, this is not a technical accreditation. Rather, it is an invite-only program (although nominations, and self-nominations are open) and is intended to recognize individuals who give back to the “vCommunity”. The exact criteria for entry are kept confidential, to avoid folks gaming the system. However, for reference, you’ll find that a lot of vExperts regularly blog, present at conferences or user groups, and just generally try to help folks. Along with the title, there are some great perks. Things such as a Pluralsight subscription, NFR license keys, and access to the vExpert party at VMworld. ...

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. ...

Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to renew my VCP cert via a different track (as opposed to getting a VCAP). The reason being is that I was just looking to broaden my knowledge. I don’t do a lot of super technical work on the daily basis, so something like the VCAP might be “overkill” (for lack of a better term). It was a toss-up between the VCP-NV and VCP-DTM. In the end, DTM won out. ...

Things have definitely been busy as of late, between VMworld, studying, and yeah … work. September is not shaping up to be any different either.. Whenever I have a few “events” all close together, I like to toss together a quick post to let folks know where I will be. The point is so that if anyone reading this is there, that hopefully they’ll let me know and we can get together for a quick “hi"if nothing else. ...

I have Tintri storage in my environment, and one of the aspects that I love about it is the visibility it provides into our vSphere environment. The VMStore itself has all sorts of great dashboards and analytics, but the integrations don’t end there. Tintri has a vCenter plugin which extends some features over to the vSphere client. Installing this plugin is not something that I commonly do. After all, if I find myself regularly blowing away my vCenter, then I probably have other issues. With that in mind I wanted to document the installation process so that a) if / when I need to do this again, I can do it quickly enough and b) if it is helpful to others, then great. Note that most of the below is for the VCSA vSphere 6 appliance, not a windows based install. I do have a file path for a Windows configuration file listed below. ...