Author: Guest Post

This guest post is by Ryan of VIRTUBYTES where you can find his back catalog of posts. Ryan writes about VMware products and a lot of related infrastructure technologies.

A few weeks back, we discussed Zerto’s ability to perform point-in-time file level restores directly from the replication journal. However, what if the data you need from 30 minutes ago isn’t readily compiled into a file or requires manual intervention to produce; such as a database backup or a PST export of Exchange mailbox items? Introducing Zerto Failover Tests for data recovery.

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This guest post is by David Espejo, who blogs at vcloudopia.wordpress.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. David writes mainly in Spanish, but has an expanding English language section here. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Welcome!. This site is mainly written in spanish but i’m starting to open a new section for an english-speaking audience, touching different topics that -I consider- may have even more resonance in the broader reach that english language enable in this globalized world😉

As part of my preparation for the VCAP6-DCV Design exam, I red different official documents and came across with a bunch of notes written, mainly, in a very informal format that could be rapidly understood by me when I needed to review them. I have practical experience deploying VSAN since the creepy 1.0 version and I have witnessed the constant effort from the VMware team to enhance the product.

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This post is reproduced from Keith  Townsend‘s blog at The CTO Advisor.

I recently attended The Reckoning conference hosted by John Mark Troyer. John is the former program manager for VMware’s vExpert program. John has a reputation as a master community builder. He’s a sought after consultant for enterprise IT vendors looking to jump start or fine-tune their community programs. The Reckoning conference was the first in what I’d assume many conferences focused on community and IT careers. Prior to the official start of the event the vBrownBag team hosted an unconference.
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This post is reproduced from Mike Letshin‘s blog at The Solutions Architect.

Every once in a while there is a day that brings together people that are from down the street, across the country and around the world with an attempt to make the world a slightly better place.  While this sounds like quite the audacious goal, The Reckoning aims to:

• Do Work That Matters
• Beyond Technologist: Communicator, Businessperson
• Be a Creator, Not An Operator

I have been lucky enough to be in attendance to represent Nexenta but also my history and background.  Kicking off the day with an unconference that was hosted by Cody Bunch and Alastair Cooke of vBrownbag we started with a generic list of topics that those in attendance thought were important to the community, the tech sector and hopefully others that could not attend.  I have done these before and the ideas tend not to get to flow past the group in attendance, and since the first break out, I volunteered to lead it seems only write to pass on some of the insight from those that may have been there, might want to go there or those that are just guessing but either way they are nuggets of knowledge.

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This guest post is by Dean Lewis who blogs at www.educationalcentre.co.uk, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. We have open slots for guest bloggers, find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Last exam of the year

The past few months I’ve forced my head into revision for the three CCNP exams, with two down, I have TSHOOT left to do, and I’m aiming to pass before Christmas Day. Which is a nice goal to have, but when I have to recertify next year, It’ll be around 24th December.

But currently, Cisco only requires you to pass one of the three exams to keep the CCNP.
The TSHOOT is an interesting exam, compared with others. It contains a small number of multiple answer based questions, however the bulk of the exam is sat around a pre-defined and publicly available topology, where within a simulator you troubleshoot various support tickets.

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This guest post is by David Espejo, who blogs at vcloudopia.wordpress.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. David writes in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish be sure to use a browser that will translate for you. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

It’s been a long time since my last post, and as always, I appreciate the opportunity that the vBrownBag community offers me to publish here. I’ve been on the road with a growing list of project deadlines due to a new consultant role that I accepted, but I’m learning a lot so I hope to share all that new knowledge here.

In this occasion I will talk about what has often been cited as the main barrier to VXLAN adoption: the requirement of Multicast in the physical network and the resulting operational burden of deploying and managing such requirement.

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This guest post is by Anthony Chow who blogs at http://cloudn1n3.blogspot.co.nz/, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Compute, Network and Storage are the 3 pillars of a data center. Storage had been my weakest point in terms of knowledge and experience.

Today I had a great chat with Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) who is very knowledgeable in different aspects of the technology field and had opened my mind in the area of “Hyper-convergence”. In this post, I am stepping out of my comfort zone again and try to venture into this area and take a look at this emerging and expanding market. In VMworld 2014, VMware announced a new product EVO:RAIL which reinforce the idea that this “Hyperconvergence” market has huge potential in the coming years.

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This guest post is by Bryan Krausen who blogs at ITDiversified, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

As mentioned in this article, there are many variables to take into consideration when deploying and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager. When failing (or testing) your virtual machines from site to site, decisions must be made on what cluster will they start on, what priority will they be failed over, and what, if any, scripts will be executed after fail over has occurred. An equally important step is ensuring that the VMs can communicate on the correct network at the surviving site. VMware SRM has multiple ways of handling customization of a VM’s IP; one that is “automated” using IP Customization Rules and another that is completely manual, set configurations per VM.  Both are explained and shown below.

Note: Site Recovery Manager supports customization of the same guest operation systems which vSphere 5.5U2 supports. Check the document here for a support matrix.

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This guest post is by Dean Lewis who blogs at Educational Centre, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

So after an interesting North West VMUG event on 12th November, I’ve decided to write my own comments on the state of employment within IT. This is prompted by Neil Mills Talk at the above VMUG event, where he gave tips on super charging your CV, and the industry as he see’s it.

Most of my recruiting experience from the last year comes from a reseller/solutions provider point of view.

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This guest post is by Bryan Krausen who blogs at ITDiversified, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

VMware’s Site Recovery Manager provides the ability to failover VMs in the event of a disaster or for planned migrations between datacenters. In my case, we’re using it for the former as we have two “main” datacenters, one located in Louisville and the other in downtown Chicago. Although we’ve tried to deploy applications with site redundancy in mind, some applications are simply reliant on a single site, whether by limitations of the software or by choice.

Decisions, decisions… Planning a VMware SRM deployment takes considerable thought as there are many choices and routes to accomplish the same tasks. For example, we could choose to utilize EMC’s RecoverPoint or VMware vSphere Replication to replicate the data to the opposite site. We could choose to create a dedicated “DR” VLAN or should we explore spanning Layer 2 across the datacenters using VXLAN or OTV. Should we purchase additional capacity at both sites or simply suspend “Tier 2/3″ VMs in the event of a failure to ensure resources are available?

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This guest post is by Melissa Palmer who blogs at vmiss.net, where you can find her back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

As part of #vDM30in30 Eric Wright wrote a great article on reducing technical debt, which got me thinking quite a bit.  Mainly about automation, and the journey it takes to get there.  Here’s a couple more ideas on how to get you started on the journey if you haven’t already begun.

(Mission Control at NASA Wallops.)

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This guest post is by Rob Nelson who blogs at http://rnelson0.com/, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

One of the most important concepts of The Goal is to increase throughput. Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales. That is, when your company takes raw materials, processes them into a finished good, and sells it, the measured rate of that activity is your throughput. Severe emphasis on sales. Throughput is not the same as efficiency. Today, we will look at throughput vs. efficiency and how these concepts apply to IT.

Though we are focusing on throughput, we must state the descriptions of the two other measurements. Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. I list the three definitions together because the definitions are precise and interconnected. Changing even a single word in one requires the other two be adjusted as well.

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This guest post is by James Brown who blogs at http://jbcomp.com/, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Good morning, afternoon, and evening to all the blog readers.

I was challenged by Eric Wright and the #vDM team to do two things. First was to write 30 blogs in 30 days. This seems to be working out, The second was to step up even further and be a guest blogger for #vBrownBag. We will see if I am asked to do it again.

 

So with the explanation out of the way, here we go.

The above introduction was more than just an explanation. In January of 2014, I decided it was time for me to start getting my name out there to maybe move up into a better career.  So I started a blog, updated my Linked-in, and started a Twitter account. The community I found on twitter was overwhelming.  One of the first people I followed on Twitter was Bryon Schaller.  He had just been accepted to participate in the #VirtualDesignMaster program.  So I started watching and following. I became more and more interested in the VCDX program and becoming a Virtual Architect.  From there I have gather 132 twitter followers.  I have followed 318 people/vendors.

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This guest post is by David Espejo, who blogs at vcloudopia.wordpress.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. David writes in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish be sure to use a browser that will translate for you. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

It has been a while since I published the first part of this entry and well, it’s time to continue.

The more I learn about it, the harder it is to compress everything into a single blog post. On this occasion I will cover the implementation of VXLAN on a VMware vSphere environment and some of the following topics will be covered in subsequent posts:

A. VXLAN and the multicast requirement: three different levels of (in) dependence from Multicast

B. vCNs Edge as an efficient and cost-effective VXLAN gateway

C. A day in the life of a VXLAN frame

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This guest post is by David Espejo, who blogs at vcloudopia.wordpress.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. David writes in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish be sure to use a browser that will translate for you. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

VXLAN seems increasingly to be on the lips of all who follow the network virtualization market these days. On one hand the Internet Engineering Task Force   (IETF) approved about three weeks passed the state technology VXLAN draft or draft a protocol to be recognized by an RFC, which provides a more solid basis for consolidation.

Moreover, the growing rise of SDN suite of VMware: NSX has led partners like Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, among others; to offer devices capable of integrating with NSX using as VXLAN overlay protocol, for their capabilities and flexibility for infrastructure requirements.

This is the motivation for this series of 2 entries, fingers crossed, will become more posts on the progress of NSX as a platform for SDN.

Let’s get down.

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This guest post is by Steven Kang who blogs at ssbkang.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

INTRODUCTION

While upgrading ESXi 5.0 servers to 5.5 , I faced an issue that a bunch of virtual machines weren’t able to be vMotioned while entering maintenance mode.

In this blog post, I would like to share with you how I went through the issue and found the solution.

SYMPTOM

Initial symptom was that whenever I execute vMotion with a several virtual machines, it stopped at 14% saying:

“A specified parameter was not correct”

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