https://www.mattallford.com/Recent content on Matt AllfordHugo -- gohugo.ioFri, 28 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/azure-bicep-linting-and-validation/Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/azure-bicep-linting-and-validation/Azure bicep: Zero to Hero Course As a shameless plug, if you like the content you see here on Azure Bicep and are looking to further expand your skills, I’ve created an Azure Bicep: Zero to Hero course, which can be found here. Linting and Preflight Validation in Azure Bicep: Ensuring High-Quality Templates As you start building out your Azure Bicep templates, it’s crucial to ensure that your code adheres to best practices and patterns.https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-dell/Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-dell/Day 2 of Cloud Field Day kicked off at Dell’s offices here in Santa Clara, which is a very nice Executive Briefing Center. It’s been a while since I’ve seen some Dell hardware, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get behind the glass to give these guys a hug. Dell started their presentation with Prateesh Sharma laying the groundwork for multi-cloud, and the important of a universal storage layer for companies who are trying to manage and operate across multiple environments.https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-softiron/Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-softiron/You’ve likely heard stories and whispers of “on-prem” being sexy again, not that it ever wasn’t, right? But public cloud had a lot of promises, some of which it lives up to, some of which it doesn’t, and some of which it does but it’s just painfully expensive. If you’re considering a refresh of your on-prem solution, or are looking to move some or all workloads back to a solution you manage, its a great opportunity to revisit your requirements, and look at implementing an actual private cloud, rather than just a virtualisation platform which oh so many of us have seen and managed.https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-neuroblade/Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-neuroblade/Cloud Field Day #19 kicked off with NeuroBlade, and I’m glad I had a coffee before hand, as data analytics is not my expertise, but I learned a lot in the session thanks to NeuroBlade and other delegates. “Revolutionizing Big Data Analytis with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit” NeuroBlade were founded in 2018, have over 120 employees, and $100m+ in capital funding. A key line they used during their funding round is they “Want to be the NVIDIA of Data Analytics”.https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-platform9/Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2024/cfd-19-platform9/Most kubernetes clusters are running at 30% or less utilisation, which means there’s a lot of resource wastage out there in the wild, which translates to dollars being spent for no value. Platform9 want to help you save some money by tweaking the way you run your EKS clusters, and this same pattern could make its way to other managed kubernetes solutions in the future. Platform9 were founded in 2013 with a relatively clear mission: Democratize cloud computing.https://www.mattallford.com/2023/azure-bicep-parameter-files/Sun, 29 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2023/azure-bicep-parameter-files/Azure bicep: Zero to Hero Course As a shameless plug, if you like the content you see here on Azure Bicep and are looking to further expand your skills, I’ve create an Azure Bicep: Zero to Hero course, which can be found here. If you prefer to consume video content, similar content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on!https://www.mattallford.com/2023/Newsletter-Launch/Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2023/Newsletter-Launch/This is a really quick post to let followers / subscribers of the blog know that I have recently launched a newsletter. It’s been 2.5 years since I’ve posted here (oops!) and in that time, I’ve been working as an Azure DevOps Engineer. In my role I gain invaluable insights and knowledge that I’m eager to share with you. Through the newsletter, we’ll explore the latest trends, keep you updated on community happenings, and offer career tips to help you thrive in the cloud industry.https://www.mattallford.com/content-portfolio/Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/content-portfolio/If you’d like to see what I’ve been working on, you’re in the right place! This page contains a summary of content I’ve created on different platforms, community contributions and projects I’ve been involved with. Courses I’ve created video based training courses for several platforms, which are listed below. Pluralsight I’m a Pluralsight author, and the easiest place to find my Pluralsight courses are at my author page, which is below.https://www.mattallford.com/2021/Brave-Browser-Azure-Portal-Something-Went-Wrong/Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2021/Brave-Browser-Azure-Portal-Something-Went-Wrong/TL;DR - In the last few days (start of 2021), the “Shields Up” feature in the Brave web browser seems to be flagging a JSON file as a cross-site tracker when creating a resource in Azure, causing the blade to not load. To work around this, you can go “shields down” for portal.azure.com. I logged on to my machine yesterday, same as any other day, and went to start deploying some resources to Azure via the Azure Portal for a customer, nothing out of the ordinary.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Microsoft-Azure-Solutions-Architect-Implement-a-Workload-Management-Strategy/Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Microsoft-Azure-Solutions-Architect-Implement-a-Workload-Management-Strategy/I’m really happy to anounce that another course I’ve created for Pluralsight has gone live in their library today. This one has a wordy title, being Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect: Implement a Workload Management Strategy, and this is a part of the Azure AZ 303 Solutions Architect focused exam path. This year Pluralsight have been putting a very specific focus on creating Microsoft Azure content spificially targetted at helping learners learn exam objectives and pass the exam to achieve a certification, rather than going deep in to skill building of all of the solutions that are covered in an exam.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Formatting-Data-in-PowerShell/Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Formatting-Data-in-PowerShell/New Pluralsight Course: Formatting Data in PowerShell I’m a bit late to the party with this post, as this course went live around the 27th of October, 2020, but I’m happy to say I’ve had my second course at Pluralsight recently go live! This course is another PowerShell based course in the PowerShell 7 fundamentals track at Pluralsight, titled Formatting Data in PowerShell. This course is aimed to help you understand the PowerShell formatting system and why results are formatted the way they are by default, and then how to override that formatting to get the data in the format you need it in.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/Microsoft-PowerShell-SecretManagement-Module/Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/Microsoft-PowerShell-SecretManagement-Module/First things first, if you prefer to consume video content, the same content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on! Secrets Management Microsoft have recently released an update to a PowerShell module they’ve been working on for a short while now which is everything to do with management of secrets. Version 3 of the Secret Management PowerShell module was released last week and it is a decent update from version 2, so much so that it includes breaking changes, as can be expected with preview releases.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Extending-PowerShell/Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/New-Pluralsight-Course-Extending-PowerShell/This is a short post and I’ll cut straight to it. I’m really happy to announce that I’ve published my first course with Pluralsight, Extending PowerShell. The course is aimed at helping you learn and understand PowerShell Modules and is part of a larger learning path for PowerShell 7 that is being produced currently on PowerShell. I have worked hard to make this demo heavy in a way that you can follow along with each task, and I hope you do, as the hands-on is where the knowledge gets solidified.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/Video-course-azure-functions-for-devops-engineers/Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/Video-course-azure-functions-for-devops-engineers/Introduction I’ve recently been working on building a video course titled “Azure Functions for DevOps Engineers”, and I’m really happy to announce that the course is now live on the CloudSkills.io platform. For the next week or so, the course is available for $7 USD (yep, seven), and I know I’m biased, but I think that’s a great deal! If you head on over to check it out, I’d also recommend browsing through the other content available at CloudSkills, there’s been so much success from students of the courses and there’s also some awesome upcoming workshops planned that you can enroll for.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/VMware-VMUG-Usercon-Australia-2020/Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/VMware-VMUG-Usercon-Australia-2020/The VMware VMUG UserCon has been my favourite local (Australian) event since attending my first one in 2017. It is one of the standout events for community sessions and networking and one I personally look forward to every year. The teams involved with VMUG and especially the local VMUG members in Sydney and Melbourne do a fantastic job every year of bringing everyone together and handling the logistics. Things will of course be different this year with the event going virtual, but I’m still looking forward to it on Thursday the 30th of July, 2020.https://www.mattallford.com/2020/microsoft-powershell-module-for-azure-functions/Thu, 25 Jun 2020 13:50:43 +1000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/microsoft-powershell-module-for-azure-functions/Introduction Microsoft recently released a PowerShell module named Az.Functions, providing cmdlets to manage the Azure Functions Service. According to the PowerShell Gallery, version 1.0.0 was released on the 19th of May, followed by 1.0.1 on the 23rd of June (2 days ago). Az.Functions is now included as part of the wider Az module, so if you install the entire Az PowerShell module, you’ll automatically receive Az.Functions. In this post, we’ll take a 101 look at some of the cmdlets that are included in this initial release.https://www.mattallford.com/about/Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/about/Hi there, and welcome! My name is Matt Allford. I have a passion for a lot of technology, focusing on Infrastructure, virtualisation, powershell and am early in my learning path of automation processes and techniques to enhance consistency and reliability. In my previous role I was working at a University as a Senior Systems Administrator where I was the lead architech and administrator for a number of solutions including Microsoft Exchange, ADFS, Microsoft failover clustering and the core Microsoft Windows Services, among other things.https://www.mattallford.com/page/sponsor/sponsor/Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/page/sponsor/sponsor/I’m happy to announce that I’ve made the decision to start accepting sponsorship on the Virtual Tassie blog. Sponsorships will allow me to: * Put more time in to blogging in general * Enhance my home lab when required to expand and refresh. The lab is crucial to me not only for my learning, but I use my lab to build out screenshots or videos which get put in to blog posts * Provide funding to attend industry events out of my own pocket Initially I am taking on sponsors with the following options:https://www.mattallford.com/2020/update-manager-initiated-reboot-doesnt-trigger-hardware-server-reset/Wed, 01 Apr 2020 20:40:43 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2020/update-manager-initiated-reboot-doesnt-trigger-hardware-server-reset/This might not be a new one to a lot of folk, but it certainly was to me! This week I was proactively updating some NIC driver and firmware for a customer to avoid a known issue where the FCoE driver could cause an ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). Both firmware and drivers needed to be upgraded to maintain interoperability. While I am very much looking forward to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (finally!https://www.mattallford.com/2019/azure-az-103-certification-experience/Sun, 29 Dec 2019 04:20:46 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/azure-az-103-certification-experience/Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vmware-vm-clone-via-html5-client-results-in-incorrectly-configured-vmdk/Fri, 27 Dec 2019 08:24:38 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vmware-vm-clone-via-html5-client-results-in-incorrectly-configured-vmdk/This one is just a quick post regarding an issue I came up against just before Christmas. To get straight to the point, I found an issue where in multiple separate environments, when cloning a virtual machine via the VMware vCenter HTML5 Web client interface, if you select the tick box to “customize this virtual machine’s hardware” and change any of the settings of the VM, the cloned virtual machine’s VMDK file(s) will be pointed to the VMDK file(s) of the source machine you used for the clone.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vsphere-replication-fails-to-register-with-sso-bad-exit-code-1/Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:59:10 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vsphere-replication-fails-to-register-with-sso-bad-exit-code-1/I was recently involved in an issue in an evnironment that started out looking like a simple SSL certificate replacement and ended with multiple hours of troubleshooting with GSS and redeployment of vSphere Replication. Fun times, right?! Let’s take a step back. This customer has a straight forward environment. Two physical sites, one vCenter Server and external PSC per site (6.5) in the same single sign on domain. Each site had one vSphere replication appliance and one Site Recovery Manager Server, version 8.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/quick-post-vsphere-6-7-sporadic-vm-resets-by-vsphere-ha/Thu, 04 Jul 2019 05:43:30 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/quick-post-vsphere-6-7-sporadic-vm-resets-by-vsphere-ha/We had a customer recently that upgraded from vSphere 6.5 to 6.7 and following the upgrade to 6.7, virtual machines were sporadically being reset by vSphere HA with the following message in the vCenter event log: Error message on <VM Name> on <Host Name> in <Cluster>: VMware ESX unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0) vmk: vcpu-0:Unable to decompress BPN(0x100018003) from frameIndex(0x3d4aa2) block 1 for VM(2103599) We got this logged with GSS quickly and after being sent on a bit of a goose chase with firmware and driver upgrades (the versions we were running we compatible, but not latest), GSS noted that 5 other cases has been logged over the past couple of days with this same issue.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/cohesity-dataplatform-6-3-active-directory-backup-and-recovery/Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:35:13 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/cohesity-dataplatform-6-3-active-directory-backup-and-recovery/I’ll be upfront and honest - backup and recovery doesn’t excite me, and it never has. On the other hand, this world of data management, policy driven protection / placement and analysis of said data does tweak my interest, which is why I taken an interest in tinkering with some of the modern platforms, for want of a better term, such as Cohesity. But as I was reading through the “what’s new” section of Cohesity DataPlatform 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/cohesity-6-2-office365-exchange-online-protection/Thu, 09 May 2019 10:54:33 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/cohesity-6-2-office365-exchange-online-protection/Introduction With the release of Cohesity version 6.2, there is support to protect Exchange Online Office365 mailboxes natively within the product. Protecting data in a SaaS platform is always an interesting discussion. At the end of the day, there is a shared responsibility model at play here, and as the customer and/or consumer, there are still some very valid reasons you’d want to ensure you are protecting business critical data such as exchange online mailboxes.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vmug-usercon-2019-sydney-and-melbourne/Tue, 12 Mar 2019 11:56:24 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/vmug-usercon-2019-sydney-and-melbourne/This approached very quickly, and next week one of the hottest VMware events in ANZ will be held in Sydney and Melbourne - the VMUG UserCon events! VMUG UserCons are a free one day event held once a year featuring a small vendor expo area, lots of educational sessions throughout the day, excellent opening and closing keynotes and of course the opportunity to mingle with industry peers, catch up with old friends and make a few new friends.https://www.mattallford.com/2019/product-announcement-nsx-t-2-4/Wed, 27 Feb 2019 08:10:30 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/product-announcement-nsx-t-2-4/It’s that time of the year again where we have a new NSX release on our hands, specifically NSX-T 2.4. I’m still really new to NSX-T, and I can tell I have a lot to learn, but I’m hoping 2.4 is the release I’m able to really start to sink my teeth in with. If you’ve been in and around the NSX product, you’ll be aware there are two main flavours of NSX; NSX-V (now called NSX for vSphere, I think, or maybe NSX for Data Center(?https://www.mattallford.com/2019/end-of-year-post-2018-edition/Sun, 24 Feb 2019 23:51:44 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2019/end-of-year-post-2018-edition/Yeah - I know, I know. It’s February 2019 already and I’m only just wrapping up the 2018 calendar year! Better late than never, right? Similar to last year, the Christmas and New Year’s break (end of December) seems like a good time for everyone to take a step back and reflect on the year that has been, and I certainly did the same. I also believe it is important to have similar reflections throughout the year as well to keep a track of your goals and evaluate if your goals have changed, and adjust with those changes.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-server-6-7u1-converge-tool/Wed, 14 Nov 2018 12:03:20 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-server-6-7u1-converge-tool/Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment).https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vembu-version-4-whats-coming/Thu, 01 Nov 2018 09:07:33 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vembu-version-4-whats-coming/Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words but may contain some material supplied by Vembu for an upcoming release or announcement. Vembu have been hard at work behind the scenes on a new version of their BDR suite and version 4.0 is due for release soon. As a quick recap, the BDR Suite is a range of products available from Vembu to help businesses with data protection and disaster recovery of their workloads.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-update-1-converge-to-embedded-failed/Thu, 18 Oct 2018 12:48:54 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-update-1-converge-to-embedded-failed/Update 27th October 2018: I was meant to provide this update last weekend, but it has been a hectic week. Within a few hours of posting this issue, a few people at VMware reached out to me to understand more about my configuration, asked me to upload the logs and a few of the smart guys and gals at VMware had been able to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, the key in the APPLMGMT_PASSWORD vecs store is used when a file based backup of the VCSA is scheduled.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/tech-field-day-extra-vmworld-2018-runecast/Mon, 15 Oct 2018 11:32:40 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/tech-field-day-extra-vmworld-2018-runecast/Runecast were the last company I had the pleasure of being a delegate for at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. I’ve written about Runecast on this blog before, and I really like who they are and what they do. Runecast is a proactive VMware management solution, delivered as a pre-packaged appliance, that aims to provide you with issue prevention, security compliance and log analytics for your VMware environment before any major outages occur.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/tech-field-day-extra-vmworld-2018-jetstream-software/Fri, 12 Oct 2018 12:38:19 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/tech-field-day-extra-vmworld-2018-jetstream-software/DISCLAIMER: During VMworld 2018 US (Las Vegas), I was invited as a delegate to the Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event. I was not compensated in any way, my conference pass was complimentary as I was a speaker at the event and other expenses were covered by my employer, Parallo. I’m not required to write this blog post, I chose to do so of my own accord. This blog post is aimed to summarise the presentation that I was present for and also to provide some additional information about the company or solution presented on, which is all based on my opinion.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-vforum-2018-sydney/Mon, 08 Oct 2018 21:50:43 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-vforum-2018-sydney/Next week the “ANZ” vForum event will be held once again in Sydney, Australia. The conference is returning to Sydney’s Luna Park where is was held 4 years ago in 2014 (from memory to celebrate a 10 year milestone of sorts), and that event was also my first vForum. vForum is also returning as a two day event after the format was changed last year to a one day event. I’m honestly not sure what the feedback was around it being a one day event, but VMware adjusting it back to two days speaks for itself.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/quick-post-powercli-firewall-requirements/Sat, 22 Sep 2018 02:17:29 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/quick-post-powercli-firewall-requirements/Last night I was working in an environment that has a reasonably well locked down NSX distributed firewall, and I was having some issues with PowerCLI. PowerCLI 10.2 on Windows, connecting to vCenter Server 6.7, to be specific. Port 443 was allowed from the jump host to vCenter Server, but I was seeing some odd issues still. I was trying to run an as built report for the environment, but I could not seem to establish a connection to NSX manager when running the script, and VUM cmdlets that are called in the script were also failing, such as:https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmworld-2018-is-around-the-corner/Thu, 23 Aug 2018 11:26:02 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmworld-2018-is-around-the-corner/Well, that rolled around quickly. I remember booking the flights, accommodation and registration for VMware’s flagship VMworld event months ago and I’m now writing this from the plane about half way through the 27 hour journey from my home in Tasmania, Australia, to Las Vegas. This isn’t going to be a post on my recommendations, tips and tricks, or “how to attend if you aren’t attending”. There are lots of resources out there for this content and I urge you to go and read some of the blogs by others as there are some really great pointers!https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vembu-webinar-why-you-need-multiple-recovery-options/Mon, 28 May 2018 10:02:18 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vembu-webinar-why-you-need-multiple-recovery-options/Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words and is not a direct redistribution of a blog post written by Vembu. With that said, I am new to the Vembu suite and have not had time since taking them on as a sponsor to use all aspects of their solution, so some of the content above has been comprised using information from Vembu’s website.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/nsx-v-controller-deployment-stuck-at-grub-boot-loader/Sat, 26 May 2018 00:13:27 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/nsx-v-controller-deployment-stuck-at-grub-boot-loader/Recently I was playing around with NSX-V in the lab and getting myself more familiar with the automation options available. During the deployment of one of my environments, I couldn’t get the NSX Controllers to come up without failing. NSX Manager would deploy the controller VM, but it sat in a “deploying” state for around 45 minutes and then failed with a message “no route to host”. I checked out the console of one of the controllers directly after deployment and as soon as it booted up it went to the following GRUB boot loader screen:https://www.mattallford.com/2018/redeploying-nsx-edges-to-a-new-cluster-after-manager-restoration/Fri, 18 May 2018 10:26:59 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/redeploying-nsx-edges-to-a-new-cluster-after-manager-restoration/That title is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s Friday night and that’s the best I’ve got! I was recently working through some recovery scenarios for NSX in the lab, as I was interested to understand what the process was for various scenarios such as: Losing NSX Manager and restoring Losing NSX Manager, DLR and ESG’s and restoring Losing the entire cluster (including ESXi hosts) and restoring NSX manager in to a new cluster The third scenario is reasonably obscure, and I’m not sure if you would follow a different restore process than what I did if this did actually happen.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-server-6-7-appliance-backup-scheduler/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:32:34 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-server-6-7-appliance-backup-scheduler/This one will be a quick post, but I wanted to alert people to a new minor but useful feature that’s included in the vCenter 6.7 appliance, which is the ability to schedule backups natively within the appliance management interface. If you wanted to schedule an appliance based backup in 6.5, you would have to schedule a task to do so. Thankfully this was made easier by Brian Graf’s script, but now we have a way to build this in to the appliance configuration with no reliance on an external script.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-embedded-linked-mode/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:17:07 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-embedded-linked-mode/[toc] Introduction Starting from VMworld US 2017, VMware announced their plans to support PSC replication and Enhanced Linked Mode with the vCenter Embedded deployment model, simplifying overall deployment and management requirements for a multi-vCenter environment. This feature is now included in the release of vSphere 6.7. In this post, I go over a little history for common deployment models, as well as what the new “vCenter Embedded Linked Mode” brings to the table.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-cross-sso-domain-repointing/Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:10:18 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vcenter-6-7-cross-sso-domain-repointing/It’s back, finally! A new feature with vCenter 6.7 is the ability to repoint a vCenter Server to another Platform Services Controller node, that resides in an entirely different vSphere SSO domain. This functionality is huge for domain consolidation, and also domain splitting (which admittedly is a less required use case from what I’ve seen, but something that still can be a useful use case). Edit: As per a comment from Rupak, I believe this feature is only available on the vCenter Server Appliance and is not available for the Windows deployment of vCenter 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/2018-sydney-and-melbourne-vmug-usercon/Mon, 19 Mar 2018 07:58:03 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/2018-sydney-and-melbourne-vmug-usercon/Well, it’s that time of the year again. The VMware User Group (VMUG) UserCon’s are on again this week in Sydney (Tuesday 20th March) and Melbourne (Thursday 22nd March), Australia. VMUG UserCon is a free day long event filled with a few keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and checking out the exhibit hall. I’ve personally only attended one UserCon, which I wrote about here, but I was really impressed at the organisation and presence from VMware, sponsors and community members.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-vexpert-2018/Thu, 15 Mar 2018 04:50:35 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-vexpert-2018/On Friday the 9th of March (morning of Saturday the 10th in Australia), VMware announced the results of the vExpert 2018 award, which is given to those who have performed various VMware advocacy related activities in the 2017 calendar year. I’m happy to say that VMware has deemed me worthy to be a vExpert again, which will mean this is my second year in the program. It’s a great program to be a part of with several perks, one of the most valuable (yet sometimes time consuming!https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-site-recovery-manager-vm-protection-network-not-configured/Tue, 27 Feb 2018 12:30:21 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/vmware-site-recovery-manager-vm-protection-network-not-configured/So that title is a mouthful, but I came across an issue for a customer today where network mappings within SRM were not functioning correctly when attempting to configure protection for virtual machines. To cover this off quickly, the environment is running vSphere 6.0U3 and SRM 6.1.2. The scenario was that we’d previously (a few months ago) configured all of the mappings in SRM (Network, resource, folder, etc). We then created a new protection group, and created a recovery plan for this particular protection group.https://www.mattallford.com/2018/one-of-those-end-of-year-posts-2017-edition/Wed, 03 Jan 2018 11:50:27 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2018/one-of-those-end-of-year-posts-2017-edition/Yep, it’s that time of year where it seems sensible to reflect on what’s happened, and maybe set some goals for the year to come. With that said, don’t forget to keep reflecting during the year, and ground yourself to see where you are at, what you want to work on and readjust yourself if you aren’t going in the direction you hoped for. Or maybe a change in direction wasn’t what you planned, but is naturally the course you have taken due to a series of events.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/nsx-controller-deployment-failed-waiting-for-vc-lease/Fri, 15 Dec 2017 23:17:07 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/nsx-controller-deployment-failed-waiting-for-vc-lease/I was recently rolling out the base install of VMware NSX in my lab, where I ran in to a controller deployment issue. The lab is running NestedESXi, and I have two ‘sites’ that are nested, each with 3 ESXi hosts in a vSAN cluster. vCenter, PSC and NSX Manager / controllers are then deployed on to the nested ESXi hosts, so the storage is on the nested vSAN datastores.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vcsa-cli-deployment-format-requires-a-mapping/Tue, 05 Dec 2017 11:25:24 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vcsa-cli-deployment-format-requires-a-mapping/I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in my home lab, which has involved me moving from a flat /24 network (yeah, I know) to a somewhat more realistic lab environment with a Cisco SG300 switch and Ubiquiti EdgeRouterx. Due to these networking changes, as I build out the environment I’ve been creating a lot of VLANs and subnets between my physical ESXi host, the Cisco switch and the ERx.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/emulex-drivers-causing-issues-with-esxi-ramdisk-and-scratch-config/Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:01:02 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/emulex-drivers-causing-issues-with-esxi-ramdisk-and-scratch-config/I’m a bit late to the blogosphere with with one, but we’ve had a couple of customers hit the issue described below, and it seems to be mostly across HPE and Dell hosts running ESXi 6.x. I’ll get to the good stuff first. If you’re hitting an issue on ESXi 6.x where the RamDisk is filling up and ScratchConfig.CurrentScratchLocation is reverting to /scratch, even with a location configured, it’s likely due to a known issue with an Emulex Driver.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vrealize-operations-service-discovery-management-pack/Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:23:45 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vrealize-operations-service-discovery-management-pack/For those that weren’t aware, vRealize Infrastructure Navigator went End of Distribution (EOD) and End of Support Life (EOSL) at the end of September, 2017. Information on this is provided in another post. If you are not aware of what vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) was, it was a tool that was part of VMware’s vCloud Suite that discovered application dependencies and mapped network flow within a vSphere environment. VIN was deployed as a virtual appliance and then registered with vCenter Server.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-infrastructure-navigator-end-of-support/Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:21:25 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-infrastructure-navigator-end-of-support/Blink and you will miss it! For those that weren’t aware, VMware disclosed a security vulnerability with the vCenter Server VIX API which has been patched, but this also impacted VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) as it used the VIX API to build service mappings. As per the VMware KB article that announced this information, if you are running vSphere 5.5/6.0 you essentially have two options. Continue using VIN on an unpatched environment (not recommended), or use a new management pack for vROps that replaces VIN functionality called the Service Discovery Management Pack.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/lenovo-x1-carbon-thoughts-after-6-months/Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:34:22 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/lenovo-x1-carbon-thoughts-after-6-months/Earlier this year, I bought a new laptop which is my daily workhorse. I don’t own any other computers or tablets. I decided to put my ramblings in to a post below. This is not a technical review of the laptop or going in to benchmarks or different customisations, there’s plenty of that available online in “formal” reviews. For the past couple of years, I have used a Microsoft Surface Pro as my main computer.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vforum-australia-2017/Wed, 25 Oct 2017 11:04:55 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vforum-australia-2017/And here we are, at the end of October. Before I get in to it, I signed up for Blogtober a few weeks ago, and this is shamefully my first post for Blogtober, and I’m writing this on the 25th of the month. Let’s see if I can get 5 posts out by the end of the month! Anyhow, it’s that time of the year again and vForum Australia 2017 is just around the corner.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-skyline/Tue, 26 Sep 2017 10:55:36 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-skyline/One of the quieter announcements from VMworld US 2017 was that of VMware Skyline. No, not the Nissan sports car! As a VMware customer, VMware Skyline is a platform that provides VMware visibility in to your environment with the aim of providing proactive and predictive recommendations, based on the configuration in your environment, cross referenced with VMware guidance, KB articles and lessons learned from other customers' environments. In the event that you log a case with VMware, Skyline also provides the Global Support Services (GSS) team access to information about your environment, without needing to spend hours gathering logs, configurations or sitting on a Webex with an Engineer while they get familiar with your environment and specific configurations.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-identity-manager-could-not-pull-the-required-object-from-identity-manager/Fri, 08 Sep 2017 11:56:55 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-identity-manager-could-not-pull-the-required-object-from-identity-manager/I was recently working in a customers environment to configure vRealize Log Insight with VMware Identity Manager. They had vIDM deployed some time ago and configured, primarily for vRealize Business for Cloud. I’m not yet that familiar with vIDM, and I learnt something new in troubleshooting this issue. When logging in to vIDM to set up the new configuration, after going to Identity & Access Management > Directories > Selected the sync directory > Sync log, I noticed there were sync issues with Active Directory:https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-topology-and-upgrade-planning-tool/Fri, 04 Aug 2017 12:15:21 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-topology-and-upgrade-planning-tool/Overnight VMware announced a new technical resource for vSphere administrators called vSphere Central. Check out the blog post here. In conjuntion with the above, Adam Eckerle released a blog post to announce the availability of a new tool named vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool. The blog post can be found here. I don’t want to repeat much of the post here, but in short to quote Adam; “This tool aims to help customers plan and execute both upgrades to vSphere 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/quick-tip-vm-autostart-issue-in-esxi-6-5-host-client/Thu, 27 Jul 2017 06:12:41 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/quick-tip-vm-autostart-issue-in-esxi-6-5-host-client/I’ve just been working through automating the powering on and off of my lab server, which is a single physical server running ESXi 6.5, and nested virtual machines for my lab. I wanted to use the ESXi Autostart feature to start my domain controller and jump box at power on. But I had an issue where one of the two VMs I want to power on would simply not start.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/powercli-script-to-power-on-or-off-vsphere-lab/Fri, 09 Jun 2017 10:37:22 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/powercli-script-to-power-on-or-off-vsphere-lab/I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/june-2017/vsphere-host-profile-could-not-select-an-iscsi-hba-for-the-profile-instance/Tue, 06 Jun 2017 11:55:32 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/june-2017/vsphere-host-profile-could-not-select-an-iscsi-hba-for-the-profile-instance/Ahh, vSphere Host Profiles. My old friend. One of our customers recently had a hardware failure on one of their Dell M620 blade servers, and the server was repaired under warranty which included a motherboard swap. The server got inserted into the chassis and booted back up OK. The server was part of a 12 node cluster, so the customer tried applying the host profile, which would fail when it hit 22%.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/melbourne-vmug-usercon-2017/Thu, 11 May 2017 22:36:08 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/melbourne-vmug-usercon-2017/Back in March, I attended the Melbourne VMUG UserCon. This is the first UserCon I attended, and damn was I impressed! From what I’ve heard via peers, VMUG hasn’t been having the best run lately, world wide. Needless to say, the team behind both the Sydney and the Melbourne events did a fantastic job. This year consisted of a rockstar lineup of speakers not only from VMware, but also from partners and affiliates who presented fantastic breakout sessions during the day.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/runecast-analyser-review-and-walkthrough/Wed, 03 May 2017 22:38:05 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/runecast-analyser-review-and-walkthrough/Runecast Analyser was founded in 2014 and at a high level, is a product to provide proactive analysis for VMware environment. I’ve only recently been introduced to Runecast and I’ve had the chance to download and use it in my lab environment. I was lucky enough to meet Ched and Stanimir recently at the Melbourne VMUG. I thought I would take the opportunity to record a walkthrough of the product for those that may be interested to see what Runecast Analyser is all about.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/additions-to-vghetto-automated-vsphere-lab-deployment/Fri, 07 Apr 2017 12:04:57 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/additions-to-vghetto-automated-vsphere-lab-deployment/So last week I received a new lab server that is going to be housed at home. It is a Dell T430 with 128GB ram, which is exactly what I was after as I want to get right back into the lab work, but I didn’t want a heap of gear and network requirements. NestedESXi has worked reasonably well in the past few vSphere releases and there’s not much that can’t be simulated within a nested environment for the purposes of learning or testing.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/esxi-agent-cant-send-heartbeats-no-buffer-space-available/Fri, 24 Mar 2017 01:04:49 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/esxi-agent-cant-send-heartbeats-no-buffer-space-available/Quick post. The other day I saw an alert on an ESXi 6.0 host as follows: Agent can’t send heartbeats: No buffer space available The host was responsive and connected to vCenter Server, and the VMs were running OK on the host. I checked the vmkernel / hostd / vpxa logs, and the only mention of this was a one liner in the vmkernel log which repeated the error message above.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-fling-vsphere-compatibility-predictor/Fri, 03 Mar 2017 10:48:14 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vmware-fling-vsphere-compatibility-predictor/[toc] Introduction If you work in the VMware suite of products and haven’t heard of or checked out the VMware Flings website, head on over and check it out! As the website says; “Flings are apps and tools built by our engineers that are intended to be played with and explored.” A lot of products and features that make it into the product start out as being VMware flings. Some recent ones that come to mind are the vCenter Migration Tool (migrate Windows vCenter to the Appliance), HTML5 Web Client, ESXi Embedded Host client … you get the drift.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/achievement-unlocked-vmware-vexpert-2017/Thu, 09 Feb 2017 09:27:40 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/achievement-unlocked-vmware-vexpert-2017/Early this morning VMware released the results for the VMware vExpert 2017 programme. Before even seeing the post, I woke up to a couple of slack messages with congrats (I’m currently on holiday and also on the Gold Coast, 1 hour behind my normal time zone!). I checked out the official post (link below) and sure enough my name is listed there, along with 1400 odd other people! From what I’ve seen there were around 100 new members in 2017.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vcenter-support-assistant-6-5-deployment/Mon, 06 Feb 2017 11:24:46 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vcenter-support-assistant-6-5-deployment/Introduction The VMware vCenter Support Assistant is a free plugin made available by VMware in the form of a virtual appliance. After deploying the appliance, it can be registered to vSphere SSO and you can authorise one or more vCenter Servers to Support Assistant. Support Assistant provides the following benefits: Reactive support. You can use the Support Assistant plugin in the vSphere Web Client to easily create new service requests (SRs), as it is essentially a front end to the MyVMware portal.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/nimble-storage-nimbleos3-vaai-xcopy-testing/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 13:01:57 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/nimble-storage-nimbleos3-vaai-xcopy-testing/Introduction Nimble Storage arrays are one of my favourite SAN arrays to work with at the moment. However, until Nimble OS3 which was made GA on the 31st of August, 2016, there was no support for the XCOPY VAAI primitive. This meant that when performing actions such as a storage vMotion that moved data between datastores on the same array, or cloning virtual machines, the ESXi host performing the action was required to read the data from the array up through the ESXi host, and then write it back to the array, creating additional load on the ESXi host and traffic on the storage adapters and network.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-gui-vcsa-embedded-deployment-walkthrough/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 11:48:58 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-gui-vcsa-embedded-deployment-walkthrough/The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 using the GUI installer, where the PSC and VC roles are installed on the same servers. This deployment model is perfect for smaller environment where Enhanced Linked Mode is not required. The PSC Topology Decision Tree is a great read if you aren’t sure on how you should deploy these core components given your requirements.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-cli-vcsa-embedded-deployment-walkthrough/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 11:47:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-cli-vcsa-embedded-deployment-walkthrough/The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-cli-vcsa-external-deployment-walkthrough/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 11:43:59 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-cli-vcsa-external-deployment-walkthrough/The post below will walk through the deployment of an external vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node and Platform Services Controller (PSC) to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well.https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-vcsa-deployment-walkthroughs/Thu, 12 Jan 2017 11:41:25 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2017/vsphere-6-5-vcsa-deployment-walkthroughs/[toc] Introduction So I’ve finally had some spare time to download and have a look at some of the vSphere 6.5 components and I’ll be planning to do a few blog posts in early 2017 on some of the cool new features that have been added in this release. I’ve decided to start with a few posts on the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using both the new GUI installer and the CLI option as well.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-5-upload-file-to-service-request-via-web-client/Fri, 30 Dec 2016 11:02:53 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-5-upload-file-to-service-request-via-web-client/Just a quick note on something I spotted as I’ve been working through some blog posts for vSphere 6.5. It looks like you can now upload files for a Support Request to VMware directly from the vSphere Web Client. KB 1008525 lists some of the main methods for uploading diagnostic information to VMware including using the Support Assistant (which I am planning to do a post on), FTP and email. It does not yet contain information for this new feature in vSphere 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/quick-tip-finding-vsphere-update-manager-version-and-build/Mon, 12 Dec 2016 11:29:11 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/quick-tip-finding-vsphere-update-manager-version-and-build/Every now and then I need to find the version and build number of VMware vSphere Update Manager that is running in a customer’s environment. I’ve written this post mainly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully it helps someone else down the track. VMware have a KB article for most of their products to correlate the build numbers with versions. The specific article for VUM is KB 2143837. Sometimes these aren’t always right up to date unfortunately.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vcap6-dcv-deploy-its-a-pass/Wed, 30 Nov 2016 05:08:31 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vcap6-dcv-deploy-its-a-pass/Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience. I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vcenter-6-5-psc-repoint-limitations/Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:18:52 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vcenter-6-5-psc-repoint-limitations/Hi all, This is just a quick note to let you all know of a limitation with vSphere 6.5. Repointing of a vCenter Server to a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in another vSphere SSO domain SITE is not supported. Please see the caution at the top of this VMware KB article. Note: As of 21/11/2016, the KB article for repointing a VC to a PSC WITHIN the same SSO domain site (see here) also has a caution to say it is not supported with 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-vforum-sydney-2016/Sat, 12 Nov 2016 12:30:19 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-vforum-sydney-2016/[toc] Introduction Well, another vForum Australia event has come and gone this week and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on my few busy days spent in Sydney attending this event. This was my third time attending vForum, and this roughly reflects how long I’ve seriously been working in the VMware ecosystem. While the last two years were OK, this year was my favourite by far, most likely due to not being afraid to meet new people and get involved in some events.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/powercli-functions-get-raw-device-mappings-and-set-perennial-reservations/Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:57:52 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/powercli-functions-get-raw-device-mappings-and-set-perennial-reservations/Introduction Just a quick post to say I’ve written a couple of powershell functions to deal with Raw Device Mappings and perennial reservations within a vSphere environment. Although I do try to avoid them, some customers do still have RDMs in their environment, mostly for Microsoft failover clusters configured at the virtual machine layer. Some ad-hoc scripts exist for this at the moment, but I wanted to break out the ‘getting’ of RDMs and then setting them to perennially reserved.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-update-manager-vcenter-privileges/Tue, 20 Sep 2016 23:39:39 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-update-manager-vcenter-privileges/I’ve always tried to use and recommend using the ‘least privileges’ model when designing and implementing systems. But we’ve all been there, when the same service account is being used to connect everything to vCenter, and said account has been assigned the full administrator role and propagated within vCenter. I’m getting my lab set up again and I needed to install VMware Update Manager (VUM). I realised that in the lab previously I have just done as I mentioned before and used a high privilege service account thinking “it’s just a lab”.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-vcsa-migration-tool-now-ga/Thu, 15 Sep 2016 23:15:09 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-vcsa-migration-tool-now-ga/A long last, VMware have made a tool available and supported to migrate from a Windows installation of vSphere 5.5 across to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.0U2. VMware gave us a teaser with a fling in 2015, but this was taken down and there have been hints dropped via Social Media and most recently some good sessions for the migration tool at VMworld 2016. Prior to this tool, migrating from a Windows install to the VCSA was not a trivial task.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/repoint-vcenter-server-to-psc/Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:07:08 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/repoint-vcenter-server-to-psc/Introduction This article will walk through the steps required to repoint a vCenter Server 6U1 or later node to a different Platform Services Controller (PSC) node. Scenario one will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located within the same vSphere SSO site, where as scenario two will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located in a different vSphere SSO site. This is almost the same process, but repointing a VC to a PSC in a different SSO Site than the original PSC requires an additional step.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/reconfiguring-and-repointing-vcenter-server-to-psc/Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:05:48 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/reconfiguring-and-repointing-vcenter-server-to-psc/Introduction Starting with vSphere 6, there are two main roles to a core vCenter infrastructure. The vCenter Server (VC) and the Platform Services Controller (PSC). During deployment, administrators are presented with two deployment options: Embedded. With an embedded deployment, the VC and PSC roles are installed on the same node External. With an external deployment, the PSC and VC roles are installed onto separate nodes. External deployment also enables the enhanced linked mode feature for vCenter Server Prior to 6.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmworld-2016-us-breakout-session-recordings-available/Sun, 04 Sep 2016 22:23:54 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmworld-2016-us-breakout-session-recordings-available/Edit: At the time of publishing, the main page at www.vmworld.com is not rendering correctly (it is just showing a blank white page where the videos should be), though it was a few days ago. The URL that should be displaying on the vmworld URL below is http://www.webcastregister2016.com/vmware/form.php, and you can go directly to this URL to access the videos if the URL below is not working when you try.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/reminder-vsphere-5-0-and-5-1-end-of-general-support/Sun, 21 Aug 2016 12:23:00 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/reminder-vsphere-5-0-and-5-1-end-of-general-support/In the busy world we live in, a lot can be said for the “time flies when you’re having fun” saying. And with so much happening in the world of the SDDC, it’s easy to forget about some of the core components that, for the most part, sit there reasonably quietly just ‘doing their thing’. This is just a quick reminder post for those still running vSphere 5.0 or 5.1, that end of general support ends for those products this week, on the 24th of August to be exact.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/esxi-and-nimble-storage-unmap-scsi-blocks/Mon, 13 Jun 2016 11:28:44 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/esxi-and-nimble-storage-unmap-scsi-blocks/OverView Back in vSphere 5 a new VAAI primitive called unmap was released. When using thin provisioned volumes or LUNs for VMFS datastores, actions such as storage vMotion, consolidating snapshots and deleting data (such as VMDK files) do not automatically reclaim the space on the underlying datastore. For example, if you have a thin provisioned 1TB datastore that has 2 x virtual machines using 400GB each, and you delete one of these virtual machines (using the ‘delete from disk’ action), the used space on the datastore will still report as 800GB.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-add-second-external-psc-to-nested-lab-environment/Sun, 17 Apr 2016 21:52:02 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-add-second-external-psc-to-nested-lab-environment/For my lab, I run everything nested within VMWare workstation, which is running on a single Dell physical host that runs Windows for the base OS. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to spend a bit more time in the lab, mostly for learning some components of the vSphere environment I’m not familiar with, but also as a test area. I deliberately started the environment with a single embedded deployment, so the PSC and VC server was running on the one node.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-reconfigure-embedded-vcenter-to-external-psc/Sat, 02 Apr 2016 10:45:08 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vsphere-6-reconfigure-embedded-vcenter-to-external-psc/Introduction As of vSphere 6.0U1, VMware allow an embedded vCenter server deployment to be reconfigured to an external deployment, which demotes the Platform Services Controller (PSC) components of the embedded node and points the VC server to an external PSC node which resides in the same Single Sign On (SSO) domain as the source embedded node. This is done by using the utility cmsso-util Before we get too much further, there are two main uses for cmsso-util:https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/vsphere-new-psc-deployment-could-not-parse-saml-token-for-authentication/Mon, 28 Mar 2016 11:56:37 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/vsphere-new-psc-deployment-could-not-parse-saml-token-for-authentication/In my lab, I deployed vCenter using the appliance as an embedded node using vCenter 6.0.0b. I purposely deployed this build, as an embedded deployment for two reasons: I haven’t used the appliance before, and I wanted the lab to be simple, but I also wanted to see the upgrade process in action on the appliance I wanted to deploy an external PSC and follow the process to re point the original VC server to the new external PSC, as outlined here: http://pubs.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/vcenter-host-profile-core-storage-psp-configuration-nimble-storage/Tue, 15 Mar 2016 03:09:11 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/vcenter-host-profile-core-storage-psp-configuration-nimble-storage/I’m working on rolling out vCenter Host Profiles at work, to keep an eye on our configuration and also to assist in the deployment of new ESXi servers into our environment. If you haven’t checked out host profiles and you have a VMWare Enterprise Plus license, it is a must! I’m working through a few of our clusters that are connected to our Nimble Storage arrays using the iSCSI Software Initiator, and that use the Nimble Path Selection Policy (PSP) to determine the best path policies from the ESXi host to the storage.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/windows-server-2012-r2-as-iscsi-target-network-binding/Mon, 07 Mar 2016 21:39:51 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/march/windows-server-2012-r2-as-iscsi-target-network-binding/I’m still getting my lab configured and I am planning on using Windows Server 2012 R2 as an iSCSI target (as well as an NFS server). The server in my environment is called Storage01. I’ve added 2 NICs to the machine, and was trying to figure out where to set the network binding for the iSCSI traffic. It wasn’t where I expected, and I couldn’t find much online, so I thought I’d write a quick note on it.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/february/exchange-2013-hybrid-mail-pending-rootcatype-certificate-issues/Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:40:27 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/february/exchange-2013-hybrid-mail-pending-rootcatype-certificate-issues/I manage an Exchange 2013 deployment at work which is configured in Hybrid with Office365. Recently we had to change our SSL certificate that was being used for both TLS for the hybrid connection and also for our client facing DNS names. Due to changes with our 3rd party SSL certificate provider, this was a new SSL certificate installation rather than a renewal. I generated the certificate and installed it onto all of the Exchange servers on-premises and during our change window, made the changes to bind the services to the new certificate and then ran the Hybrid connection wizard to update the certificate used in our On-Prem send connector to Office365 and also to the receive connector in our Office365 tenant.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/powercli-script-configure-esxi-host-for-connectivity-to-nimble-iscsi-san/Mon, 01 Feb 2016 04:39:09 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/powercli-script-configure-esxi-host-for-connectivity-to-nimble-iscsi-san/So last week I noticed that a user by the name of Dean had opened a thread on the Nimble Connect forums with some handy PowerCLI to configure an ESXi host to connect to Nimble Storage arrays. I had done the same thing near the end of 2015 when we installed 6 Nimble Storage arrays in our environment, and I was meant to get around to putting it all together in a powershell function/script.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-srm-duplicate-initiator-iqn-1998-01-com-vmwareserver1-280206e1-found-in-sras-discoverdevices-response/Mon, 18 Jan 2016 09:28:28 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-srm-duplicate-initiator-iqn-1998-01-com-vmwareserver1-280206e1-found-in-sras-discoverdevices-response/When setting up VMWare SRM 6.1 with array based replication, I was seeing an error after adding the array managers into SRM. The error was Duplicate initiator ‘iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:Server1-280206e1’ found in SRA’s ‘discoverDevices’ response. In the vmware-dr-xxx.log file found in C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager\Logs there was a tiny bit more info: 2016-01-13T09:39:10.757+11:00 [03508 info 'DrTask' opID=5cacf7dd] Task 'dr.storage.ReplicatedArrayPair.discoverDevices112' failed with error: (dr.storage.fault.DuplicateInitiator) { --> faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null, --> command = "discoverDevices", --> responseXml = "<Initiator id="iqn.https://www.mattallford.com/2016/srm-array-based-replication-volume-mounted-as-snap-xxxxxxx-volumename-after-failover/Wed, 13 Jan 2016 20:42:26 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/srm-array-based-replication-volume-mounted-as-snap-xxxxxxx-volumename-after-failover/I’m going through the process of installing VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1 in our production environment, which is currently running vSphere 6.0U1. We use Nimble Storage arrays and have elected to make use of array based replication (ABR) for data replication between sites. During our initial testing and doing full failovers of some dev applications, I noticed that the datastore name within vCenter for the protected volume on the SAN was getting renamed, and had a prefix of snap-5b356a02-VolumeNamehttps://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-update-manager-sysimage-fault-sslcertificateerror/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 01:37:53 +0000https://www.mattallford.com/2016/vmware-update-manager-sysimage-fault-sslcertificateerror/Recently I’ve gone through the process of replacing the machine_ssl certificates on our vCenter and PSC nodes at work, and shortly after I went to use Update Manager and received the following error: sysimage.fault.SSLCertificateError We opted for the ‘Hybrid’ model of certificates in vSphere 6, where the machine_ssl certificate on the PSC and VC server nodes is replaced with an externally signed certificate, and the VMCA takes care of all of the solution user certificates using the default configuration.