Category Archives: VMware

2015 02 01 21 21 48

Invited to speak at North West England VMUG – 25th February 2015

General, VMware, , ,

Great news, I’ve been invited to speak at the North West VMUG on the 25th February. And there is a raffle for a iPad Air 2 and nVidia K2 Graphics card. (That’s the selling points of why to come covered).

The VMUGs are great, you usually get some free training, a couple of vendors taking about their products, with less of a sales slant. And someone from the community taking about their real experiences. For the North West VMUG, Nathan and Steve both put a lot of effort into the agenda ensuring a day that will cater to most, and ensure there is always something you can take away.

This means they put a heavy focus on the people who turn up, and what they want. Which personally, when I attend, is not the usual sales talk about a product. Take the last event for example, Trend where there talking about how great their product is and the fact it beats everyone else. However there was an opportunity to really grill the speaker, who was a techie just like me. I was able to get down to the nitty gritty about trend’s worldwide connected features to detect and block threats in near real-time. The speaker also detailed about one of their biggest customers, and the challenges faced, and how by implementing trend helped them. Rather than the usual, this product is used by 40% of Fortune 500 companies.

Where do I fit in?

shutterstock_presentation

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cbt

Patch Released – Major bug in VMware’s CBT function. KB2090639

Storage, VMware, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

VMware have finally released a patch to fix the Major CBT bug that causes your backups to be corrupted because the changed blocks are reported incorrectly.

Within the release notes for the 5.5 latest patch, its kind of hidden away to the point that  I missed it the first time.

When you use backup software that uses the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) API call QueryChangedDiskAreas(), the list of allocated disk sectors returned might be incorrect and incremental backups might appear to be corrupt or missing. A message similar to the following is written to vmware.log: 

DISKLIB-CTK: Resized change tracking block size from XXX to YYY 

For more information, see KB 2090639.

You can get the patches below for your version of choice, however there is no fix for ESXi 4.x yet.

ESXi 5.0 Patch 10 – Patch information

ESXi 5.1 Update 3 – Patch Information

ESXi 5.5 Patch 4 – Patch Information

You will need your my.vmware.com login details to access the patch repository to download the zip file, then just import it into your VMware Update Manager within Admin View.

2015-01-29_11-05-47

Regards

Dean

networkvirt

Revision notes from VMware Network Virtualization Fundamentals Course

Networking, VMware, , , , , , , ,

VMware released a free course around Network Virtualization Fundamentals, which maps to the first steps on the ladder for all things NSX. It is also recommended by VMware to take the course before taking on the VCA-NV.

I urge anyone looking into NSX to take this course, you can’t argue with the price after all!!! Secondly, although there are many NSX posts online name, Brad Hedlund has some of the best posts in my opinion.

Check the NSX-Link-O-Rama aswell.

And finally, the NSX Compendium over at Network Inferno

Below are my notes I took whilst going through the course.

The Basics
Virtual switch
  • Ports organised into port groups
  • Uplinks connect virtual switch to physical network
  • Connections to support virtual infrastructure

Virtual standard switches – configuration per host, therefore needs to be replicated exactly to all hosts

  • Port groups
  • VMkernel Ports
  • Uplink Ports
  • Policies at virtual switch level can be over-ridden  at port group level
  • VLAN’s set at port group level and VMKernal Port level only
  • No support for things like STP, as virtual switches cannot be connected to one another, nor do they learn MAC addresses.

vsphere-network-standard-switch

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veeam 2014 logo color tag

Veeam Hidden Feature – Backup Validator

General, VMware, , , , , , ,

So the other day I was using the Veeam Backup Extractor Tool, located in the installation folder, when I noticed another .exe file that I hadn’t paid attention to previously.

  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe

This a CLI based tool, and does exactly as the name suggests, validates backups.

You can access it by running command prompt;

  •  CD “C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup”
  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe and your arguments(to see the full options, see at the bottom)

This is a handy little tool for validating the backup files, and can probably be scripted as well. However unlike the SureBackup feature, it will not guarantee that once the files have been restored, the Virtual Machine’s operating system is intact and in a working condition.

An example of its use

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cd0c065db23c0f842cbc48b9eeaf720c

Veeam v8 – Backup Fails – NFC storage connection is unavailable

Storage, VMware, , ,

I encountered this issue on a brand new Veeam installation the other day. When running a test backup job.

"Error: NFC storage connection is unavailable, Storage: [stg-datastore-(Number),nfchost-host-(Number),conn:(ServerName)"

2014-12-01_23-15-37

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