Everything-Virtual

Author: Simon

  • SanDisk Cruzer Fit – Write Protect on ESXi 5.x – Fix

    I recently came across an issue with my home lab that indicated I had an issue with my Cruzer Fit going to a Write Protect mode, doing a search online showed that a number of people were also exhibiting the same kinds of issues but this wasn’t being restricted to SanDisk Fit drives.

    I have been a fan of the Cruzer Fit for a while now, it’s sleek size meant that prying little fingers (I have a two year old who loves to investigate) can’t pull it out and lose it and it looks great on the front of my Shuttle SH63H3 cases so I was a bit alarmed to realise that I may have to replace these with another brand of drive that may not offer me the same flush fit as the Cruzer Fit.

    One thing I have to mention is that my usual method of installing ESXi in to my lab environment usually involves using VMware Workstation to create a VM, attaching a USB drive to the laptop and then attaching that to the VM, hey presto you have a readily available way of installing ESXi on to a system that doesn’t have a CD\DVD drive fitted. The reason I mention this will become clearer later on in the article.

    Now I should mention that the original lab build was done on VMware ESXi 5.1 and I blogged about how to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 here, during that time I haven’t really had much need to make changes to my ESXi environment and didn’t take note as to if\when the SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives I was using in my environment went to read-only but I know it has to have been after the 5.5 upgrade.

    Now how did I know that the drives had gone to a write protect mode? well carry on after the break to find out.

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  • DiskPart Commands to Clean and Format a USB or fixed Disk

    I put together this little post to help people clean and format their USB or fixed disk in Windows 8.1, I needed this because some of my USB drives have previously been formatted with ESXi or Linux installed on them and this was the easiest way to bring them back to a useable format.

    Continue after the break to see how to clean your ESXi or Linux formatted drive

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  • Yet another year in the life of Everything-Virtual.com

    Here’s how I did in 2014

    “Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 64,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    The busiest day of the year was October 16th with 333 views. The most popular post that day was How to upgrade your Iomega IX4-200D Disks.”

    Compared to last years this is an increase in of 12,000 page views, not bad considering I didn’t manage to post nearly as much as I would have liked to.

    “The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 52,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    In 2013, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 135 posts.

    The busiest day of the year was July 9th with 320 views. The most popular post that day was Condusiv V-locity VM Testing.”

    All I can say is thanks to my readers for continuing to read my site Smile

    Click here to view the entire report

  • 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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  • Using Managed Object Browser to remove old vCOPS Registration

    Playing around in my home lab over the last couple of months I carried out an installation of vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), had a look around it and then promptly deleted the vApp after a month or so.

    Spring forward a couple of months and going through the new vROPS 6 installation and going through the vCenter registration process with vROPS 6 I received the following error message.

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    Because this installation isn’t actually replacing an existing instance I decided against overriding the existing registration and decided to go with a de-registration, thereby allowing a fresh registration of vROPS 6.

    Using the MOB incorrectly can lead to you breaking your vCenter server so please do so carefully.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – Initial Configuration

    In the previous blog post I left you at the Getting Started vRealize Operations Manager screen.

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    In this blog post I will be going through both the Express and New Installations, continue reading for more information.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – Installation

    This is a multipart blog post detailing the installation and configuration of the new vRealize Operations Manager product.

    Unlike the previous vCenter Operations Manager release this is a single VM only product and doesn’t rely on the two node UI and Analytics VM vAPP.

    Now deploying the appliance is pretty straight forward, in fact if you have already deployed an OVA file before you can deploy vROPS as well but for those of you who haven’t deployed an OVA \ vApp before please continue on.

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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

  • From Techie to Manager – A new career direction

    I have been fairly quiet with the blog over the last couple of months due to things going on in my life both professionally as well as personally.

    For the last two years I have been attached to a Project Team that was focusing on Dev workloads utilising various VMware technologies, as the technologies have matured and the likes of VCHS have come around the idea of running these workloads on-premise have changed to the idea of running them off-premise and using the on-premise infrastructure to run production based workloads instead. The move to a Production ready state has meant changes within the team and one of those changes was the need to create the role of Cloud Services Operations Manager.

    As a senior engineer within the Cloud Operations Team I like being technical, the technologies I work with are some of the most bleeding edge around (when VMware whistle when they see what my colleagues are doing with the products you know we are doing some amazing work) so I was a bit surprised when asked recently why I hadn’t put myself forward for the new manager position. I didn’t see myself as a manager but the more I thought about it and the more I talked to friends and family the more I realised that actually there was no real reason why I couldn’t be a manager and that it was basically the next logical step in my career path.

    So I made the decision to apply for the role, something completely different for me but offering new challenges than the ones I face as a techy. As a hands on techy I know that I will want to get involved with the day to day technology but as a manager I know that I have to take a step back and actually trust in the team around me that they can get the job done without me micro-managing them constantly, I also understand that as a manager the only way I am going to keep my head in the game is to carry on with my home lab and use that to keep me up to date on all the new technologies around the VMware Stack.

    I am thankful that my company has given me this opportunity and I hope to prove to everyone (me included) that actually you can move from being a techy to that of successful manager Smile

  • VMware vExpert 2014 Results

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    Corey Romero (@vCommunityGuy and @vExpert) just posted up the results of the 2014 VMware vExpert awards and I am pleased and humbled to be awarded the vExpert award for the third year running.

    Congratulations to my colleague Ross for being awarded his first of what I am sure will be many awards, well done that man Smile

    Last year there were over 300 vExperts awards, this year that jumped to an amazing 754 (ish as there have already been some duplications reported).

    Please head over to http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-announcement.html for the complete break down of whose who in the world of VMware vExpert 2014.