An IT Professional with over 20 years’ experience with broad consultative, technical and managerial experience. Currently a solution architect working with customers and partners to architect and deliver hybrid cloud solutions using the VMware and other leading IT technologies. Leading and supporting business transformation programs, digital enterprise enablement programmes covering organisations in both private and public sectors.
A former leader of the Bristol and South West VMUG (VMware User Group)
Simon holds multiple high level industry certifications for IT Architecture, Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2014-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert Cloud Management sub-programs.
Simon is currently working for Xtravirt as a Solution Architect and can usually be found on twitter @simoneady
I recently came across Infinio and after reading about the unique way it tackled the problem of increasing I/O and reducing latency I was curious to see how it would perform in my lab.
A few things I would like to point out. First of all Infinio works only with NFS storage, secondly it does not require flash storage as it utilizes the host RAM instead however it provides only read acceleration.
It was with great honor both Sam and I were awarded vExpert 2014 (my first and Sam’s second award!) we are both proud to be listed alongside so many others in the vExpert programme.
You can view the announcement and the full list here - http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-announcement.html
One of the things that never fails to amaze me are the superb PDF diagrams I occasionally stumble upon so i thought it would be a useful idea to list some of the the ones I have found on my travels.
vSphere 6 ESXTOP quick Overview for Troubleshooting http://www.running-system.com/images/2015/04/ESXTOP_vSphere6.pdf
VMware vSphere 5 Memory Management and Monitoring diagram http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2017642
Concepts and best practices in Resource Pools http://federicocinalli.com/blog/item/194-concepts-and-best-practices-in-resource-pools#.Uzre1_ldV8F
Network port diagram for vSphere 6.
Recently I have had the pleasure to use PernixData but I did come across a bit of a ‘gotcha’ after uninstalling it from my hosts.
If like me you use iSCSI then you will likely spend a bit of time setting up your Path Selection Polices to suit your specific needs, so it was interesting to note the following.
When you do uninstall and remove PernixData from your hosts your Path Selection Polices do not revert back to your original configuration rather they revert back to the default vSphere setting of MRU (Most recently used).
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock you will be aware that VSAN was launched last week and has gone GA today and from what I have seen so far I do think VSAN is a great product and I think VMware have done a superb job with it.
Aside from the -many- discussions on twitter and other channels regarding the then lack of licensing information and pricing I was eager to see if VMware would offer a “foundation” VSAN option for SMB/SME
There are many ways to tackle the problem of quickly redeploying or recovering ESXi hosts, Host profiles, Auto deploy etc.. however such options are either out of reach for SME/SMB users where their license does not cover such features or they have very small clusters of which Auto deploy etc would perhaps be considered overkill.
So how can we backup the config of our ESXi hosts? There is a great command you can use in vSphere CLI “vicfg-cfgbackup.
Since the keynote by Frank Denneman at the LonVMUG many months ago the PernixData product has been something I wanted to test to see what benefits it may or may not bring to our SQL environment, I did have the good fortune to briefly beta test it last year but this blog post will cover the current full version (FVP 1.0.2.0). I am aware that 1.5 is just around the corner and with it comes full support for vSphere 5.
In case you missed it VMware have now released vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) in Europe! The first data center residing in Slough with more data centers planned across Europe in the near future.
Working in an SME that has several existing vSphere environments this was of real interest, as the need to scale out quickly from our Private clouds is rapidly becoming a requirement.
Having already spoken to VMware on the phone to get a rough idea on options and costs I decided to take a look at the Hands-on-labs to see how easy it really is to use and migrate VMs from an existing private cloud to vCHS.
For those of you unaware VMware recently released the VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist
What does it do?
“VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.
Problem Fairly recently I came across this error message on one of my hosts “esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full”
Fallout While trying to address the issue I had the following problems when the ramdisk did indeed “fill up”
PSOD (worst case happened only once in my experience) VM’s struggling to vMotion from the affected host when putting into maintenance mode. Temporary workaround A reboot of the host would clear the problem (clear out the ramdisk) for a short while but the problem will return if not addressed properly.
