Plain Virtualization

There are lots of content available nowadays especially with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, there are many on how to migrate off VMware and feature function comparison. One of the great content that is easily digestible from 2TekGuys . Below is a breakdown from the video on the features that was mentioned available on other hypervisors in comparison with VMware vSphere. I am not going to go into feature beyond mentioned in the video. Here are the list of features mentioned: Load Balancing : Moving using live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between hosts to due to contention. Backup : Support of backup from popular backup vendors or from hypervisor vendor themselves. Storage : Able to utilize external network storage/SAN or hypervisor own hyper-converged storage only. Live Migration : Ability to move VMs without any downtime between hosts. Having specialized on VMware vSphere for a long time in my career and been in a technical role from picking up VMware. I am always amazed by...

Recently, I got into a discussion with my colleague regarding vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) and a good discussion on the area where VCHA could be of use. Before we start, I like to summarize the few questions that always got asked during my course of work and as well when I teach vSphere Install, Configure and Manage course. What is VCHA use for? It is really meant for local site availability. Where a lost of vCenter Server can create an outage to other management components where vSphere HA RTO is not sufficient or vSphere HA is not possible to bring up the vCenter Server. Can VCHA be used in a stretched cluster setup and how should we plan to place the nodes? Yes. You will definitely have two sites in a stretched setup. And if you like to have VCHA implement in such a setup, you will need to have a 3rd site or minimal a separate cluster at the passive node site. Typically you will have active node at site 1, and passive node with witness node at site 2 where witness node is...

VMSA-2020-0006 & CVE-2020-3952 Yes you read it correctly. There is a known vulnerability which may affect your vCenter Server running version 6.7 regardless is it on virtual appliance (vApp) or Windows. It affect new deployment as well as upgraded version from 6.x to 6.7. Here is the article to read more about it. Often to hear from some to wait for a while before patching. I like to bring out a point that software patches and security patches are two different subject. Security patches This affect an immediate vulnerability been address, it should be action on to avoid breaches and compromise. This is utmost important unless your organization does not deem security loophole been important to be addressed or your organization is claimed to be highly secured. Software patches This type of patches is to address bug fixes and some times to upgrade from and update or it can also be release of some features which was delayed, etc. Often, this may not impact many cu...

With many new start ups from storage arrays, converged, hyper-converged to software defined storage (SDS), many users starts to have lots of choice to make. Recently encountering many questions on which should they choose and which is better.  However there is no straight answer as there are just too many choices to choose from just like in a supermarket.  In the end, some may choose one that advertise the best and create the best reminder in your mind.  To be truth, you will not buy and replaced the rest, but rather some have a hybrid environment for some reasons which we will go through later. With several asks and questions, I like to give some guideline when deciding.  Here I will do my best to start with no bias towards any technology and this is my personal opinion and may not be the same with others. 1.  Ease of management: A big word often misused by marketing I would say.  Assess it and ask yourself do you have a team to manage different comp...

With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware have announce a new backup appliance based on EMC Avamar.  However there are also some limitations to the free vApp have. Recently Data Protection has release an Advanced version which was announced on the blog . To help everyone have a better understanding of the two I have done a summary as below. Here is some of the FAQ which you can read from here for more information. Below is a summary of the two editions. VDP VDP Advanced Per CPU licensed Included with vSphere Essential Plus and above Included in vSphere Enterprise with Operation Management and above Max deduplicated storage per appliance 3 favours of 0.5TB, 1TB, 2TB Dynamically provisioned up to 8TB Max supported VMs per appliance 100 400 Max appliances per vCenter 10 10 Full VM and file level recovery Yes Yes SQL & Exchange server ...

Export ESXi configuration file After you configured an ESXi host, you can back up the host configuration data. Always back up your host configuration after you change the configuration or upgrade the ESXi image. IMPORTANT The vicfg-cfgbackup command is available only for ESXi hosts. The command is not available for ESX hosts and is not available through a vCenter Server system connection. Requirements: VMware vSphere CLI installed on workstation Open VMware vSphere CLI Command Prompt Type vicfg-cfgbackup.pl -s [backup_file_name] -–server [server_name_or_ip] --username [user_id] e.g. vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –s c:\esx1_20082011.txt –-server 192.168.1.1 –-username root Restore configuration file After you configured an ESXi host, you can back up the host configuration data. Always back up your host configuration after you change the configuration or upgrade the ESXi image. IMPORTANT The vicfg-cfgbackup command is available only for ESXi host...