Everything-Virtual

Category: Virtualisation

  • Voting now open for the 2014 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs

    It’s that time again, Eric Siebert from vSphere-Land.com runs a vote for the top VMware and Virtualisation blogs. As there are now over 300 blogs listed on the nominations page there are a lot of sites to choose from.

    The voting is simple and should take no longer than a couple of minutes and allows you to choose your top 10 favourite listed blogs. The scoring is such that a #1 vote gives you 10 points, #2 vote gives you 9 points all the way down to a single point for a 10th place vote.

    The following criteria should be taken into consideration when voting.

    • How long have they been blogging
    • How long are the posts
    • How often do they post
    • How well are the posts written

    If you like the content that I provide here and would like to cast a vote for my blog I would really appreciate it, the blogging is done because I want to do it but I hope you the reader also get something out of it.

    Thanks for continuing to read the blog and come back soon.

  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring ESXi Syslog Settings

    In a previous post I installed and configured the Synology Syslog server to allow me to stop me getting the below message on my hosts.

    image

    The reason for the message is that I run my 3 ESXi hosts using SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB keys and as such there is no persistent storage for logs. In this post I am going to show you how to configure some VMware infrastructure to point to our newly configured Syslog server.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Installing the Synology Syslog Server

    In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives

    image

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Creating and Configuring an iSCSI Distributed Switch for VMware Multipathing

    In an earlier post I configured my Synology DS1513+ Storage server for iSCSI and enabled it for Multi-Pathing, in this post I will show you how to create and configure a vDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) for iSCSI use and how to enable Multipathing to use more than one network path to your storage (there by increasing throughput).

    image

    Using the vCenter client you can see that in the above screenshot that I have 4 Intel NIC ports on my hosts that aren’t currently assigned to a vswitch.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring Datacenters and Hosts

    In the previous post we installed and configured access to vCenter 5.5, it’s great that we have vCenter installed but with no datacenter or Hosts configured we aren’t going to be doing too much with our new installation so what we need to do is add a new datacenter and a host to allow us to work with the vSphere suite.

    02-12-2013 09-18-25

    Launch the Windows based vCenter Client

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  • Veeams’ Ultimate New Year’s Resolution 2014

     

     

     

    Exclusively for the virtualization community, Veeam raffles great prizes that will improve IT Pros daily working experience!

    Join the raffle and be fully equipped for 2014!

    Register now to get one of the following prizes:

    • Tablet of your choice: Android, iPad or Surface
    • Class of your choice: Microsoft Training or VMware Education Services course
    • Event of your choice: TechEd or VMworld in your geography (pass, no travel)
    • Home lab with HP and Netgear products: one mega server, ReadyNAS Pro, SSDs and amazing WiFi router
    • Software kit: MSDN subscription, Veeam NFR licenses and VMware vSphere

    Make sure to register before Dec. 24 to enter raffle!

    You can check out the competition here: http://go.veeam.com/ultimate-new-years-resolution.html

  • Installing the Home Lab – VMware Certificates – Part One

    The following post, the first in series of posts, details the installation and configuration of a Windows 2012R2 Enterprise CA to be used with a VMware Infrastructure Home Lab.

    It is assumed at this stage that you have a single host installed and are running a Windows Domain controller.

    As this is a home lab I have chosen to install the CA on to my Domain Controller rather than a dedicated server but if your environment is capable of running a dedicated CA VM then please do so.

    The installation can be carried out either using a PowerShell script or by using the Microsoft Wizard. I have only documented the PowerShell method here but you can use the Wizard if you want instead.

    Use the PowerShell script below to install the CA and Web Enrolment roles.

    Add-WindowsFeature ADCS-Cert-Authority, ADCS-Web-Enrollment -IncludeManagementTools

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  • Creating vCenter and VUM 5.5 databases.

    As a precursor to installing vCenter 5.5 in my 2012R2 lab at home I needed to create the vCenter and VUM databases in SQL 2012 and make sure that everything was setup correctly before the vCenter installation.

    To make things easier I used the SQL Scripts below to create two DBs (VC55 and VUMDB) as well as creating the vc_user account and password.

    [code lang=”sql”]USE MASTER;
    GO
    CREATE DATABASE [VC55] ON PRIMARY(
    NAME=’VC55′,
    FILENAME=’D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\VC55.mdf’,
    SIZE=5000KB,
    FILEGROWTH=10%)
    LOG ON
    (NAME=’VC55_log’,
    FILENAME=’E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\VC55.ldf’,
    SIZE=1000KB,
    FILEGROWTH=10%)
    COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
    GO
    [/code]

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  • ESXi 5.5 Upgrade in 7 Steps

    So with the release of ESXi 5.5 I decided to follow my previous instructions and upgrade my hosts using the esxcli commands.

    1. Place the Host into Maintenance Mode and ensure that there are no running VM’s on the host.

    2. Ensure you have SSH enabled

    image  image  image

    3. Make sure that the Outbound HTTP rule is enabled, either by using the console or via the command line later on (command line is esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient )

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  • Condusiv V-locity VM Testing – Synology DS1513+

    This is a follow on posting about my Condusiv V-Locity VM testing carried out back in July.

    I have carried out testing on the Synology DS1513+ NAS using both iSCSI and NFS.

    Lab Setup

    Host Hardware

    ESXi HOST: Shuttle XPC SH67H3, 32GB RAM; 1x i7 3770 @ 3.4ghz with ESXi 5.1u1 (5.1.0 build 1021289)

    STORAGE PLATFORM

    Synology: DS1513+ running DSM 4.2

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