NSX-T is the next major evolution in VMware’s Software Defined Networking. The VMware Validated Design team constantly looks for solutions that will bring value to our customers. As NSX-T is one of those solutions we wanted to bring it into the design in such a way as to not disrupt existing customers deployments, which are based on NSX for vSphere.…
For the past 18 months I’ve been a Senior Consultant with the Cloud Infrastructure Management Professional Services Organization here inside of VMware. It’s been a great year and half and I’ve grown both professionally and personally by having the opportunity to work with some great customers, some who pushed me and some who made me pull some hair out. Back…
I’ve been a bit distracted lately and wasn’t able to get this written up as soon as I would have liked, but in any case here is the final part in my three part series of setting vSphere 5.1 with vCenter Heartbeat and custom SSL certificates. Part one can be found here and part two here. The most important part…
Every time I go into a Site Recovery Manager engagement and we start talking about how the test functionality works I always get the question of how to make a domain controller available to the test network. I always say I have a script for that, so I thought I’d share it with anyone who might need it. The script…
I’ve been working with a pretty big client the last couple weeks planning and upgrading around 20 vCenter 4.1 servers to 5.0 Update 2. This client runs all their databases on Oracle, currently version 10.2.0.4. I checked out the Interoperability Matrixes and found that 10.2.0.4 is supported for vCenter 5.0 Update 2. This client also uses the Oracle 11g client.…
In my previous post I talked about the requirements this customer had and the high level architecture and products used to fulfill their requirements. In this post I’ll walk through the installation of each component and protecting it with vCenter Heartbeat. In each site we’ll need a total of 15 public IP’s and 10 channel IP’s, by public IP I’m…
Over the past couple of weeks I got to work with a client who generally would have not used PSO for a vCenter upgrade but because of the new features, such as SSO, introduced in 5.1 they brought me in. The customer, like many, didn’t really understand SSO and the different options to deploy it. Many customers I talk to…
I haven’t done much with templates in quite a while. Last week a client requested I assist with creating a Windows 2008 R2 template. We installed the base OS, did some minor configuration such as installing VMware Tools, enabling RDP and disabling the firewall using netsh, since this template would be used for various server types and we had no…
This past week I was working with a large Telco on their first vSphere deployment. This particular deployment was with vSphere 5.1 and was a lot of fun getting to use some new features in the real world such as Auto Deploy Statefull Install, enhancements in the distributed switch, among others. That’s not to say we didn’t have any issues…
I’m currently at a client who is moving their SRM protected VM’s onto Hitachi VSP arrays. It’s been close to 6 years since I’ve done any work with Hitachi and replication so I assumed it would have gotten better since then, unfortunately it hasn’t, it’s exactly the same as it was. The storage admin, thankfully, is pretty sharp and had…
