Everything-Virtual

Category: Virtualisation

  • Creating a CentOS 7.2 VMware Gold Template

    In a post from last year I documented how to create a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template for all the non-Linux admins out there.

    There were questions at the time on me not leaving this in a fully cleaned state making it not 100% usable outside of my homelab environment. centos7

    Following the instructions below will yield a template ready for future use that ensures you can deploy at speed and in a reliable fashion ensuring that SSH keys are deleted, logs emptied and unique network identifiers are removed from the image.

    All told this should take no longer than 30 minutes to complete.

    Just to point out that for this to succeed you need to be running vCenter 5.5u3 or vCenter 6 as found in the Guest OS Customization Matrix 

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  • Condusiv Technologies V-locity 5 Testing

    I have been running the Condusiv Technologies V-locity 5 software on a couple of test machines in my home lab over the last couple of days, alongside those VMs I also ran a couple of VM’s with the older V-locity VM product to see how performance differed.

    Testing on both products still takes a few days but there are a couple of differences in how the performance data is presented at the end of the test.

    In the previous version you ran a Benefit Analysis Report to show you before and after information which generated a nice PDF that you could save, this PDF gave you a page full of information that made for very easy reading.

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  • V-locity 5 Install and Configuration

    So I was recently offered the chance to test drive V-locity 5 to see how it compared against the previous V-locity VM product that I tested nearly two years ago, one of the big differences between the two products is that this time I am using the V-locity Management Console (VMC) as my centralised management and deployment tool.

    This post covers the installation and configuration of the VMC and the deployment of agents via it.

    One of the first things I noticed after downloading the installation file from the Condusiv Technologies website was that the new package came in quite a lot smaller in size than the previous version, I mean like about 50% smaller, now considering this includes the VMC as well as the V-locity package you have to hand it to the developers with regards to size reduction.

    Supported Platforms for the VMC and V-locity agents, as you can see you’re not restricted to either physical or virtual for either the VMC or agents.

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  • Condusiv V-locity 5 Testing

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    Nearly two years ago I was given the opportunity to take out the Condusiv Technologies V-locity VM version 4 product for a spin in my home lab, the results were pretty positive and certainly something I would suggest to anyone running a Windows estate to investigate.

    Move forward a couple of years and I was contacted by their technical director after having filled out an online questionnaire, he remembered my blog articles and wondered if I wanted to take the new version of V-locity 5 out for a spin to see how it compared, V-locity 5 now combines both the V-locity VM and V-locity Server products under one product banner.

    V-locity is an I/O reduction software solution that increases application performance in virtual, physical and cloud environments by 50% or more without the cost of additional hardware

  • Dramatically Faster Application Performance
  • Target Applications
  • Performance Validation
  • Seamless Deployment and Management (more…)

  • Creating a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template – Updated for Deployment Fix

    I have created a new post here that details the most up to date information for CentOS 7.x Templates.

     

    I have documented how to create a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template for all the non-Linux admins out there. centos7

    Following the instructions below will yield a template ready for future installs that ensures you can deploy at speed.

    All told this should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

    I have amended the post with details on how to fix the guest customisation issues that I was experiencing before.

    I can now successfully deploy new VM’s from the template.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – One or more ports are experiencing network contention

    Having installed vRealize Operations Manager a couple of times recently in my home lab I came across an error that initially caused me to rip out the lab and build it again changing the way my networking was being done. Why? Well the following error was being presented to me when I logged in to the Operations Manager console.

    2015-01-24_21-13-16

    In a home lab environment this confused me because, well it’s a home lab environment and there wasn’t a lot going on (I had 5 VMs running across three hosts at the time).

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  • Installing ESXi to a USB key using VMware Workstation 11

    This is an updated post covering VMware Workstation 11 instead of Workstation 9, it’s been updated to cover installing using the formatwithmbr switch during the initial boot process as well as highlighting an issue with creating multiple USB keys from the same VM template.

    This is still the the quickest and easiest method for me to install ESXi on to a host with no local CD\DVD drive.

    Continue to read after the break for the updated build \ preparation process.

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  • VMware Workstation Multiple USB ESXi Build Issue

    During a rebuild of my home lab recently I stumbled on to problem which means I need to update the VMware Workstation \ Fusion ESXi build instructions I have previously issued. Due to me having to rebuild the hosts one at a time to ensure that the USB drives use the mbr partition instead of GPT I followed my previous instructions of using a VM in VMware Workstation to rebuild all three USB drives, all was good with the first host running but as soon as I added hosts 2 and 3 I started experiencing issues with the hosts not working well with each other. Each host was able to ping components outside of themselves but were unable to ping the other hosts, making things even stranger still was that I couldn’t add the hosts to vCenter either, having done the obvious and made sure I hadn’t made any mistakes with networking (all using the correct IP addressing, subnet masks and DNS servers etc) I put a post out to Twitter asking for some advice, this wasn’t a new build having had been used previously to build out the Shuttle servers so I knew that the ISO image was fine so then someone asked what happened with a single server being on line, powering down two of the hosts I found myself able to ping the remaining host without issue, however as soon as I powered up another host I encountered dropped pings all over the place.

    Thinking perhaps that I had a faulty NIC card (it happens and is the reason I have a spare one sitting around) I started playing with all three hosts to see which one of the three could be causing the issue, as it turns out none of them and all of them. Individually each host performs as expected, it’s 100% pingable, able to join vCenter and works as expected but adding any other host to the environment would cause the entire environment to break down and become un-responsive.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – Initial vCenter Configuration

    In previous posts I have demonstrated the installation and initial configuration for the vRealize Operations Manager 6 installation. At the end of the last post we were left at the log on screen to continue the configuration.

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    Log in with the admin user and password and let’s continue after the break to configure vRealize Operations Manager.

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  • My NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [v6.0] Experiences

    nsxThis past week I was fortunate enough to have attended the VMware NSX 6.0 Install Configure, Manage (ICM) course run by VMware at the Global Knowledge offices in London. The instructor for the course was the great Paul McSharry, author and fellow vExpert so I knew we were in good hands from an instructor point of view.

    The course is designed as a 5 day course but in actual fact I believe that the course could have been run over 4 days instead – especially with decent working labs.. more on that one later.

    One of the things concerning me from talking to a colleague of mine who recently sat and passed the VMware NSX VCIX exam was that this was definitely more networking orientated than I was used to and I wondered if this was the right course for me, it’s definitely aimed at guys with decent networking backgrounds (and in fact it was recommended that I also look at the Cisco CCNA Data Centre as an exam to help broaden my experience with data centre networking).

    In hindsight I would have been better off to have sat through the VMware Network Virtualisation Fundamentals and the Pluralsight VMware NSX for vSphere – Introduction and Installation courses prior to attending but obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing Smile

    The course was pretty much broken down to a 50/50 split of instructor led and hands on lab sessions and this is where things started to fall down Sad smile.

    VMware have decided to take the newer VMware training away from the VATCs and host it themselves, so instead of utilising the training providers vSphere infrastructure you’re using VMware’s Labs, which in the case of the NSX course appear to be US based (anyone who has done the VCAP Admin exams will have experienced the laggy environments before). US based Labs aren’t such a bad thing if you’re not running 3 or 4 concurrent training courses around the world. In our case we were not only contending with our own local students but also students from other classes around the world (at least 3 NSX ICM courses were being run this week in Europe).

    With multiple courses being run concurrently speed and reliability of the lab environments left a lot to be desired, in fact we tended to find that the instructor led portion of our training was carried out in the morning to see if the other classes who finished before us meant we had a better responding lab environment (it didn’t).

    Next up was the age and reliability of the environment, I understand that the NSX: ICM [v6.0] course is being run on 6.0 of the NSX product and not on the newer 6.1 release (with 6.1 having been released back on the 11th of September and 6.1.2 having been released on the 4th of December) I would have liked to have seen the course updated to a newer release of the 6.0 track instead of running on 6.0.2, especially as there were issues highlighted back in July 2014 on the Beta courses that are still active now.

    Finally my lab experienced a failure that would have taken longer to fix (remove all the NSX components, create a new standard switch, migrate off the distributed switch, delete and recreate the whole kit and caboodle again) so I had to start using a fresh lab, oh and this was on day 3 of 5 so whilst my peers were doing labs 10+ I had to start again from lab 1 and that unfortunately meant I struggled for the rest of the course (I was doing lab 13 when I decided to call it a day at the end of the course on day 5).

    All in all of the 14 students on my course not one of them went a day without some kind of performance issue, luckily I was the only to experience a complete lab failure so I was the only one who didn’t actually manage to finish the labs.

    Final thoughts were that this really should still have been classified as a beta course (it wasn’t) because the course was quite possibly the worst performing course I have attended in a while (even worse than the vCloud Director 1.5 course I attended that was nearly cancelled 50% of the way through due to poor performance) and as such I hope that VMware improve their offering for future delegates because I know that we weren’t the only course to have experienced issues (and not just this time either).

    I will be posting more material covering my experiences with the VCP-NV as I plan on taking that quite soon