Over the last 9 months, a lot has happened in my life; I have a nice titanium plate in my shoulder now courtesy of a major car accident. I changed roles at Novosco from Infrastructure Engineer to Cloud Technologist – focusing more on R&D and emerging platforms, and I helped out Frank Denneman and Niels […]
Vote for your top vBlogs and podcasts!
It’s time for the annual Top 100 vBlog voting as hosted every year by Eric Siebert. This year is notable as some of the long-standing champs of the blogging scene have chosen to withdraw (notably Frank Dennemann and Duncan Epping) to allow some new blood to enter the top 10. For good reason, as Duncan […]
Implementing a multi-tenant networking platform with NSX
This post is part of the Multi-tenant IaaS Networking course.
So we have covered the typical challenges of a multi-tenant network and designed a solution to one of these, it’s time to get down to the bones of it and do some configuration! Let’s implement it in the lab, I have set up an NSX ESG Cust_1-ESG and an NSX DLR control VM Cust_1-DLR with […]
Recovering NSX Manager with corrupt filesystem
I had a bit of a storage outage in my lab due to a funky behaviour on the Synology that I use as primary storage for all my VMs: Today I Learned: Adding IP address to interfaces on Synology causes reboots :/ Lab now in not such great shape. 80 VMs with APD. #vExpert — […]
Migrating from VCSA embedded PSC to external PSC
On a bit of a shorter note to my previous article/novella1https://blah.cloud/architecture/designing-modern-private-cloud-network/ – I have been moving my lab to a bit more of an “enterprise” style architecture – deploying SRM was in the way for that, so I had the need to set up another vCenter, however this gave the opportunity to move to a […]
Replicating SAN on openSUSE with VAAI
This article was written a few years back, but never published – it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as […]
VMworld 2016 EMEA: My Sessions
It’s the time of year again for VMworld and now comes the unpleasantness of choosing sessions and fighting them out against each other for time slots, last year my session list was basically completely dominated by NSX sessions. Taken a bit more of a broad view, instead with some cool stuff around service provider networking/administration, […]
Configuring Auto Deploy Stateless Caching in vSphere 6.0
Following on from my previous post on configuring custom ESXi images for PXE deployment, it piqued my interest again in Auto Deploy, now that I have a lab large enough (enough physical failure domains) to justify auto-deploy I figured i’d give it another go. I have chosen to implement stateless caching as it will allow […]
Building a customised ESXi image for PXE installation
I have recently been working on a larger scale platform for my employer, it requires quick deployments of environments on VSAN with some standardised VIBs added in, initially we were doing this with a standard ESXi ISO install through iDRAC and then installing vCenter, vSphere Update Manager and pushing the VIBs to the hosts via […]
vSphere Update Manager – Cannot Scan Host
I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer in my lab recently – it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t […]