Space reclamation of VMFS 5 Datastores using esxcli

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It was a bit quiet here in January caused by a new “private project” which has attracted some resources, and will pull more resources in the future.

But this will not stop me from documenting useful stuff. This one is nothing new, but commonly asked by some customers: How do I get my storage capacity back after deleting VMs?!

The outlined steps are all done using esxcli. You need to execute them on a single ESXi host, not on each host in the cluster.

Connect to one of your ESXi hosts using SSH. You can use this small PowerCLI command to enable SSH on a specific host.

… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.4 Build manageability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design

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This seems to be my last blog post for 2019 and it covers covers objective 2.4 (Build manageability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Evaluate which management services can be used with a given vSphere Solution
  • Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to management
  • Differentiate available command line-based management tools (PowerCLI, vMA etc.)
… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.3 Build availability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design

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This blog post covers objective 2.3 (Build availability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Evaluate which logical availability services can be used with a given vSphere solution
  • Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to availability
  • Describe the concept of redundancy and the risks associated with single points of failure
  • Explain class of nines methodology
  • Determine availability component of service level agreements (SLAs) and service level management processes
  • Determine potential availability solutions for a logical design based on customer requirements
  • Create an availability plan, including maintenance processes
  • Balance availability requirements with other infrastructure qualities
  • Analyze a vSphere design and determine possible single points of failure

Let’s start with…

Evaluate which logical availability services can be used with a given vSphere solution

VMware vSphere offers a broad band of features that allows you to create highly available solutions.… Read more

Why we need a vSAN licensing for SMB customers

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Not every customer is running a full-blown vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing. To be honest, when I look at the number of sold licenses, most of my customers are running vSphere Essentials Plus. Not Essentials, nor Standard or Enterprise (Plus), but two or three hosts with Essentials Plus. And that’s perfectly fine!

Two or three hosts with 10 GbE and pretty often 12G SAS. Some of them with Fibre-Channel, nearly no one with iSCSI. My colleagues and I developed a pretty rock solid setup over the last years, which we sell like some kind of building block: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, Aruba Switches, vSphere Essentials Plus.… Read more

VMware ESXi 6.7: Recurring host hardware sensor state alarm

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I had a really annoying problem at one of my customers. After deploying new VMware ESXi hosts (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10) along with an upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance to 6.7 U2, the customer reported recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages in the vCenter for all hosts.

After acknowledging the alarm, it recurred after a couple of minutes or hours. The hardware was finde, no errors or warnings were noticed in the ILO Management Log. But the vCenter reported periodically a Sensor -1 type error in the Events window. The /var/log/syslog.log contained messages like this:

Sure, you can ignore this.… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.2 Map service dependencies

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This blog post covers objective 2.2 (Map service dependencies) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vSphere design
  • Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies
  • Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes
  • Determine service dependencies for logical components
  • Include service dependencies in a vSphere 6.x
… Read more

Load balancing ADFS and ADFS Proxy using Citrix ADC

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Last week I had to setup a small Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) farm that will be used to allow Single Sign-On (SSO) with Office 365.

Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is a solution developed by Microsoft to provide users an authenticated access to applications, that are not capable of using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA).

Required by the customer was a two node ADFS farm located on the internal network, and a two node ADFS Proxy farm located at the DMZ.

An ADFS Proxyserver acts as a reverse proxy and it is typically located in your organizations perimeter network (DMZ).… Read more

vCenter Migration from 6.0 to 6.7 fails due to missing user role

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Actually, yesterday should be the day at which I migrate one of the last physical Windows vCenter servers installed in my customer base. Actually… the migration failed twice. And each time I had to rollback, power-on the old physical server, reset the computer account etc.

The update was from VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Update 3d (7462484) on a Windows 2012 R2 server to vCenter Server 6.7 Update 3 (Appliance). The migration failed at 62% with the following message:

… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.1 Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design

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The last few weeks have been quite busy. Time to focus on exam preparation again. Let’s start with the first objective of the second section.

This blog post covers objective 2.1 (Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements
  • Build non-functional requirements into a specific logical design
  • Translate stated business requirements into a logical design
  • Incorporate the current state of a customer environment into a logical design

Let’s start with

Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements

Functional and non-functional elements sounds familiar.… Read more

Supported Active Directory environments for Microsoft Exchange

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It is time for some words of wisdom, in regard to Exchange and the supported Active Directory environments. It is the same as with the supported. NET Framework releases: Latest release does not automatically mean “supported”.

To be honest: I nearly nuked a customer environment with ~ 300 users yesterday by preparing the domain for the first Windows Server 2019 Domain Controller.

First things first: Everything is fine! I did not prepared to forest schema for Windows Server 2019.

The support for Windows Server 2008 R2 comes to an end and some customers are still running it. Like my customer yesterday.… Read more