2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 1 – from scratch for VMware ESXi

Cisco, VMware, , , , , , , , , ,

First off, huge thanks to the following posts by Rene Van Den Bedem and his Cisco UCS installation guide.

My aim here is not to rip off his posts, but to detail the process myself and use my own screenshots, as along the way, the setup was slightly different to Rene’s, such as the configuration needed for the SD Cards, and the lack of boot from SAN configuration.

Covered in Part 1;

  • The hardware/software
  • Cabling diagram
  • Pre-Reqs
  • Understanding Cisco’s policy based management
  • Summary of Task List
  • Setting up Fabric Interconnects
  • Connecting to Cisco UCS Manager

The Hardware/Software Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 1 – from scratch for VMware ESXi →

vmware vcp dcv

VCP5-DCV Exam Experience

General, VMware, , ,

I passed the VCP5-DCV exam at the start of the week.

Why take it now?

Having worked with VMware for many years, I’ve never actually taken a VCP exam, this was due to not realising many years ago you could sit an exam and the course was not mandatory. When I finally looked into taking a VCP exam, VMware had just changed the rules, so that the course requirement was mandatory.

So I spat my dummy out and didn’t bother, as my employer at the time would not send me on a course, and I couldn’t afford it myself.

Fast forward, VMware released the VCP-NV exam, where the course requirement was waived if you had a CCNA or CCNP certification. Brilliant, I jumped onto the VCP-NV and hammered all the material out there I could find, as I was also looking at moving companies to work with NSX full time.

Having passed the VCP-NV, it then allowed me to sit any other VCP exam without sitting the appropriate course.  So I finally got around to sitting the VCP5-DCV

The exam itself

Continue reading VCP5-DCV Exam Experience →

One year blogging

General

So my blog is now one year old!!!

Unfortunately I didn’t get any cake for myself. I bought the domain back Feburary 2014, and setup the WordPress blog official on 4th April 2014. Since then, its been a kick ass ride producing content, appearing as a guest blogger on other sites and generally earning appreciation and respect from my peers.

Originally I planned to create educational content for budding system / IT admins to pass the CompTIA A+ Exams, as I used to be a lecture to mature students teaching the CompTIA curriculum. Producing content for online consumption and possible print is hard work, and I’ve yet to find time to properly dedicate myself to this, so instead of making a half-ass attempt at it, the idea has been shelved for now.

Instead I just blog stuff from my day-to-day work that I think would be helpful to others. Or because I know I’ll need to use the info in the future (my most used post is adding HP repo’s into VMware update manager)

first birthday

 

The Highlights

So here’s some of the highlights from blogging or that’s come of my blogging

Continue reading One year blogging →

2015 05 11 15 17 57

vCenter 6.0 Client Application GUI bug – VM’s showing Snapshots?

VMware, , ,

Today I’ve noticed that when using the vCenter C# client, each VM shows up as allowing for “Revert to current snapshot” and “Consolidation” however there is no open snapshot on the virtual machine.

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Above we can see clearly the options to “Revert …” and “Consolidate” are available, but when looking at Snapshot Manager, they are is nothing apparent.

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Looking into the configuration of the VM, there is no number string appended to the file name for the hard drive, i.e -00000001.vmdk as you would usually see for hard drives of a VM that is running on a snapshot

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If I bite the bullet and try to revert the snapshot or consolidate the VM, the vCenter task comes straight away, but the options are still available.2015-05-11_15-05-25 2015-05-11_15-05-52

Logging into the Web Client, you can see these options are not available for the VM.

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This means that it must be a GUI based bug in the application. As VMware are trying to phase out the application, I am not sure if they will resolve it.

Update – it is a known issue

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Frank Buchsel is a Technical Support Engineer for VMware, and his blog is brilliant! I urge you to check it out.

Regards

Dean


backup error

ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes

VMware, , , , , ,

Post update 14th May 2015

VMware have released a hotfix KB2116126.

Removed information regarding old CBT workaround for Veeam is incompatible

_________________________________

So it’s come to my attention that the new and mighty ESXi 6.0 has a CBT fault as well. This time its effects are different than previous versions, but causes you backups to either fail, or take a considerably longer time to complete.

Here is the official KB from VMware: KB2114076 – Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0 (2114076)

The Cause

Below is VMware official note on the issue, which isn’t very promising, and will affect any backup technology using snapshots within VMware.

This issue occurs due to heap exhaustion when attempting to enable Change Block Tracking (CBT). 

If a virtual machine with a large number of virtual disks reached an upper threshold, enabling CBT fails because of heap exhaustion. This issue also occurs with multiple virtual machines with CBT enabled. In case of Windows virtual machines with VSS enabled, taking a quiesced snapshot creates double the amount of memory overhead.

Note: The virtual disks can be spread across virtual machines or can be in a single virtual machine.

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You can look in your VMKernel.log from the host the affected VM is on to see various warnings about CBT.

WARNING: CBT: 191: No memory available! Called from 0x418010db750e

Here I’ve used the System Centre Configuration Manager Trace32 Tool for viewing the VMKernel.log

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Continue reading ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes →