Happened upon an unusual error while wrestling a Nexus 1000v out of a ESXi 5.1 host. All seemed to progress well, the host was removed from the dvs without issue. The next step was to remove the Cisco vem VIB from the host in preparation for upgrade. esxcli software vib remove -n cisco-vem-150-esx (or whatever […]
Often when when working in large environments you’ll get interesting requests. These may be to assist in troubleshooting, auditing, reporting or any other reason. I was recently requested to provide a list of mac addresses for every VM with a vNIC in a specific vlan. I had a feeling this was going to be a repeated request […]
I’m a big believer in “helping yourself”. By researching and actually doing things, we learn, grow and become more self-sufficient. I’ve blogged before about what I sometimes refer to as hidden gems, in particular MiTrend. There are other tools from EMC that are very useful. The first is My Documents (MyDocs), which is targeted at […]
If you’re familiar with Cisco IOS and networking in general, creating a new PortGroup on a Nexus1000v is pretty straightforward. Here I’m going to add a new Port-Profile, of type ‘vmware port-group‘ called “VM_Prod_29” with VLAN ID “29 “. Login to the active VSM and first create the VLAN; [crayon-6a5e7e77e3945931652747/] Then create the Access PortGroup and […]
There’s no doubt Software Defined everything is big right now, and VMware NSX is probably King of the Hill. It’s a big focus of Vendor Roadshows and Tech Community events, and rightly so. As a customer, it’s not easy to get experience on such a platform. But as an influencer, architect and admin of my […]
I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic scripting techniques will save you […]
I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic scripting techniques will save you […]
When you don’t use something for a while, you tend to forget how valuable it can be. Even from its very early iterations, ESXi has been able to display CDP information so you can quickly establish “what’s patched where “. Easy to get from the gui, but far more useful from the shell or cli. […]
Although it’s not mandatory, the Cluster Witness Server (CWS) in a VPLEX Metro Cluster serves a very important purpose as the arbitrator between inter-cluster network partition failures and actual cluster/site failures. It’s a lightweight (<3GB) VMware vm deployed from an OVA that establishes itself in a 3 way VPN between both VPLEX clusters and monitors heartbeats […]
RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup coverage. The ability to recover […]