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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. It really is one of the stand out events of the year for me, and I’m glad to be attending the Melbourne UserCon again this year, thanks to my employer. ...

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!) being the vExpert Slack channel where you see and can be a part of excellent conversations. ...

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. This was back when the datastore actually had no virtual machines, so at that point in time there was no VM protections to action, as it was preparing for an upcoming project. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. here are two links to Dell’s website which describe the issue and workaround. ...

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. From there, VIN started mapping application dependencies using VMware Tools and the vCenter Server VIX API. ...

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. If you are already on vSphere 6.5, VIN will not work so your only option is to use the SDMP. ...

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. I started with a Surface Pro 3 when I was working for a University, and when I moved jobs to a Managed Services Provider, I thought I was happy with what I had and so I purchased a Surface Pro 4 with the dock and Type Cover. After using it extensively for the first 9 months in my new position, I kept realising I was unhappy with my decision, to the point where I was ok with admitting it to myself. There were a few key reasons for this, but the major ones were keyboard, kickstand and DPI scaling. I also made this mistake of purchasing a model with 8GB of RAM. I was constantly maxxing this out, sometimes without even running a couple of local virtual machines that we usually require in the MSP role. I also quite consistently had docking issues with the SP4. I had the newest dock available at the time, but on occasion one or both of my monitors wouldn’t get detected. I was often trying to redock, or at times even had to unplug the Display Port cables from the back of the monitors so they were detected properly. Alas, I made the decision to move back to a ’traditional’ laptop. This was in around April 2017. ...