Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
We regret to inform you that your attempt to achieve VCDX certification on June 09-11, 2015 in Frimley, UK was unsuccessful.
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but somehow I still hoped my assessment of the defense was pessimistic and so it was nonetheless disappointing. It’s a big hit to not achieve something I have been focusing on for months and it is hard not to feel embarrassed that I didn’t make the grade. I am looking forward to receiving some feedback from the panelists and will be gearing up for another attempt in October.
This is not my normal sort of post - don’t worry, normal service will resume shortly.
I read Christian’s comments on the vCommunity - or lack of it - yesterday and although some things resonate with me, and a lot of other people, I don’t quite agree. I want to be clear this is a response to Christian and not an argument, I respect Christian as someone who does contribute to the vCommunity.
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page
.
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page
.
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
I will be upgrading
vCenter Server Appliance - currently 5.5 update 1
vSphere Update Manager - currently 5.5 update 1
3 HP N54L resource hosts
1 Intel NUC management host
In my lab I run various VMware software suites listed below, although I typically run them in nested environments to keep my lab install relatively clean.
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Checking for driver compatibility
In vSphere 5.5, VMware dropped the drivers for quite a few consumer grade NICs - in 6 they’ve gone a step further and actually blocked quite a few of these using a VIB package. For more information, see this excellent article by Andreas Peetz.
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance
Download and mount the VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643 ISO image (mounted as G:\ on my workstation).
Browse the ISO and run the Client Integration Plugin “G:\vcsa\VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe” - it’s a simple next, next finish sort of install.
vRealize Log Insight 2.5 improves on the clustering in previous versions with an Integrated Load Balancer (ILB) which allows you to distribute load across your cluster of Log Insight instances without actually needing an external load balancer. The advantage of this over an external load balancer is that the source IP is maintained which allows for easier analysis.
The minimum number of nodes in a cluster is three, the first node becomes the Master node and the other two become Worker nodes. The maximum number of nodes supported is six, though acording to Mr Log Insight himself, Steve Flanders
, the hard limit is more:
<img class=“alignright wp-image-5603 size-medium” src="/images/2015/02/cisco_SG300-20_1.png" alt=“Cisco SG300-20” width=“300” height=“180” of upgrading my lab switch, which is the excellent Cisco SG300-20, I’ve not had a chance to update the firmware since it was released 6 months ago because of the downtime. For some reason I prefer configuring the SG300 from the command line - a hangover from my old networking days I suppose, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me to use the GUI!
Recently, I’ve had a bit of a SOAP baptism of fire - the project I am working on makes hundreds of SOAP calls to multiple SOAP APIs on multiple hosts. During this time I’ve encountered some common and rare problems and troubleshooting them seems to be a bit of a black art, if the number of results in Google is any measure.
To demonstrate some of these troubleshooting methods I will use a global weather SOAP service, http://www.webservicex.com/globalweather.asmx?WSDL
. I’ve added the web service to vRO using the “Add a SOAP host” workflow, and then used the “Generate a new workflow from a SOAP operation” workflow to create a new workflow: GetWeather. This simple workflow runs successfully:
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.