Monthly Archives: October 2014

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How to produce good documentation – Part 1 – The foundation of any IT infrastructure

Oh No, that word….

Documentation is like a dirty word in a technicians mouth, we all hate producing it and we all hate keeping it up-to-date, but we all understand the value that it holds.

Some technicians despise keeping documentation, rather keeping it within their own heads, this is idea is built up from years of keeping themselves useful by being the only person in the office who can do X Y or Z.

But this is an old way of thinking, people are more tech savvy, and let’s be honest, Bosses, technical or not are more confident in today’s world that if they get rid of the said person, they’ll be able to replace them with some young kid who will pick up the pieces quickly and probably take the company in a new direction and produce better results.

So with that, I am going to outline some steps, tips and guide you on how to create documentation for your existing environment, or for a new project your under taking.

What is good documentation?

Continue reading How to produce good documentation – Part 1 – The foundation of any IT infrastructure

VMworld Barcelona 2014 – Here I come

So I’m off to do my first year at VMware VMworld in Barcelona next week.

Which means no posts from me for over a week.

I’m looking forward to it, I actually am excited for the technical aspects, rather than the partying, but I’m happy to be going back to Barcelona for the second time this year, doubt I will get a chance to see Barca though.

VMworld Barcelona is more towards the End-User computing part of VMwares business, which is fine by me as its the bit that interests me most. One a day to day basis I work with VMware a lot, but more infrastucture than EUC.

The hottest topic that I’m looking forward to is NSX, as a Cisco fanboy (#CiscoChampion) and qualified in that area, its a big change to the market coming, or so they say. So we’ll see how it goes, some of the technical deep dives look a bit to much for me at this stage in time, but I am booked for;

  • Virtualize your Network with VMware NSX

I’ll sit down and watch the recordings of the other NSX sessions when I get back from barcelona and have some time to digest the information.

The deep dives are ones not to miss if they apply to you, so I’m onto the;

  • Extreme Performance Series – Understanding Applications that require extra TLC for better performance on vSphere
  • Veeam Availability Suite v8
  • vCenter Server Architecture and Deployment

So if anyone is attending but reading this first, drop me a tweet and we can grab a beer, because most of all I’m looking forward to the networking opportunities.

 

Dean

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Using VMware and CDP information (HP and Cisco Switches)

So on of the most valuable networking features of VMware is setting up CDP information or LLDP (if using non cisco devices). We can see exactly which VMNIC is plugged into which port.

ESXi can receive and display CDP information within the client or web client, but this doesn’t work with HP switches which use LLDP, which you will see in the below examples for both vendors.

Below the environment is plugged into a HP switch and no CDP information is being displayed into the standard switch, however we can send CDP information from VMware ESXi to the HP switch. (But from a Cisco Switch the information does show)

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Continue reading Using VMware and CDP information (HP and Cisco Switches)

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Creating VPN tunnel between Cisco ASA and Watchguard XTM

Today was the second time I’ve done this in around a year, it’s a little uncommon to be honest, which means googling advice on how to do it, is a bit thin.

Todays walk through is also made even more different by the fact that at the branch site containing the Watchguard, its connected to a Cisco 857w router, with a Public IP address NAT’d to it due to the site having an ASDL connection.

See the below diagram I’ve sketched up in visio;

Cisco to Watchguard diagram

It’s actually easy enough to setup, the official documentation on the Watchguard is here, but doesnt cover it all.

Continue reading Creating VPN tunnel between Cisco ASA and Watchguard XTM