Tag Archives: VMware

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

vmware

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)

Microsoft Exchange Hosting

Microsoft Exchange – No DNS servers could be retrieved from network adapter

The other day whilst virtualising an Exchange 2010 server from Hyper-V to VMware we found that mail routing outbound stopped working.

When looking in the event log we found;

Error ID: 16025

No DNS servers could be retrieved from network adapter %1. Verify that the computer is connected to a network and that the Get-NetworkConnectionInfo cmdlet returns results.

Continue reading Microsoft Exchange – No DNS servers could be retrieved from network adapter

veeam 2014 logo color tag

How to setup Veeam Direct SAN Backup over iSCSI – Unleash the Speed!

On twitter Rick Vanover posted this link, which intrigued me, giving your Veeam Server access to the VMware VMFS volumes for quicker backups. Sounds dangerous, or maybe it isn’t!

So I tried it, and I managed to cut my test backup times from 24 minutes to 12 minutes! Also the snapshots are removed from the VMs within seconds.

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1. Setup iSCSI initiator on your Windows Veeam server, and get the IQN info. Setup your NIC’s in the correct VLAN for the iSCSI access and with an appropriate IP address.

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2. On the storage device, allow access to the necessary volumes from your Veeam server. If possible, set it for read only access! (Here’s me setting up access for a Nimble Device).

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3. In the iSCSI initiator dialog box, add in the iSCSI discovery IP, and ensure all your volumes show.

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4. ****The Important bit**** Open disk part and enter the following “automount disable”

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5. Open up computer management and you should see that you now have disks showing from the Storage Array, for me, I had to click these to “Online” otherwise Direct SAN access wouldn’t work.

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6. Within Veeam I then changed my Backup Proxy settings to only use “Direct SAN” mode so that I could test it and ensure it was working.

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7. Run a backup and enjoy faster results, here’s my before and after shots (the second run I ran “Active Full” as the job is set to do reversed incremental).

Before;

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After;

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Dean (twitter)