Tag Archives: Support

vmware

vCenter 7.0 – Image based backup is still supported, but won’t be in future versions

VMware, , ,

When vSphere 7.0 (and therefore vCenter 7.0) went GA, a number of customers were hit with a very important change;

  • vCenter support for image based backups was no longer supported

Since the GA, after customer feedback, the vCenter 7.0 release notes have been updated and I’m happy to report that Image based backups are still supported.

However, note that this method is now deprecated and will not be supported in a future release.

My advice is to start planning your move to using the native backup capabilities within the vCenter appliance itself, and for further information please see the following resources;

vCenter 7.0 imaged based backups supported but deprecated in the future

 

 

Regards

Dean Lewis
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Support Ticket Template – Helping you help your vendor support teams

VMware, ,

Below is a support template I crafted with some members of our VMware GSS team, to help my customers reduce the typical back and forth information gathering to help them get to a resolution faster.

Instead when logging a ticket, my customers can log all the necessary information upfront.

Hopefully you will find this useful, and it can be used/adapted to use with other vendor support teams or even internally within your own business.

[Customer Information]
1. Engineer name:
2. What is the Business Impact?

[Product and Environment Information]
1. Environment Name:
2. What VMware products has the customer deployed?
3. What type of environment is impacted?
4. What was the customer doing when the problem was observed?
5. List FQDN and IP for each impacted device:

[Problem Description]
1. Describe the specific problem symptoms:
2. When was the problem first observed (Date/Time)?
3. When was the problem most recently observed (Date/Time)?
4. Describe the recurrence pattern for the problem if existing:

[Problem Troubleshooting]
1. What investigation has been conducted by the customer (give a full report)?
2. If a workaround has been attempted, describe the steps and outcome:

[Ask to VMware GSS]
1.What specific request is made of GSS?

[Logs]
Please collect all relevant product logs and upload them to the SR as outlined here for review:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008524
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008525

Regards

Dean

Dean Lewis

 

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Nimble Storage – The life of a failed disk

Storage, , , ,

Today I found out a disk had failed in a production SAN. Oh no!!!

images

But like previous experiences, this is different. And my support experience is pretty darn good. So I thought lets write this up. Because you always here about the terrible failures and pain in the arse experiences, never the good.

Note:  This post is about the support experience, but it must be noted, there was performance or end user impact during this failure either!

The notifications

So the first notification came in, telling me the disk was unhealthy and that it was being inspected by the array, the main thing is;

  • Informed me of the issue
  • Informed me of the actions

Nimble Storage Disk failed Notification 1

Second notification, confirmation the RAID was in a degraded state.

Nimble Storage Disk failed Notification 2

Third notification,  confirmation the disk had failed.

Nimble Storage Disk failed Notification 2

The support call

Or rather the lack of support call, I logged onto Nimble Infosight. Continue reading Nimble Storage – The life of a failed disk →