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.
I’ve just upgraded to BE.Net 1.6, and I thought I’d migrate to GoDaddy’s IIS 7 servers at the same time. The theory is that this would be a an easy migration and I’d have the weekend to iron out any bugs. Not so.
After testing on my local IIS 7 and working perfectly, I uploaded the updates to my live blog and hit the “Migrate to IIS 7” button, which promises it will be completed in 24h. I received the “update your DNS” email, and duly updated my A records to the new server, and the transfer seems to be ok – aside from the fact that viewing any specific post causes an error – I’m guessing with the permissions of the App_Data folder. The catch being that I can’t access my IIS settings until GoDaddy have completed their 24h migration process.
Configuring the Virtual Environment and Virtual Machines
Note – this configuration will work for ESXi 4 upwards due to the server 2008 MSCS requirement for persistent SCSI-3 reservations.
The first step is to create a new vSwitch for the host-only cluster heartbeat network, don’t assign any network adaptors to the switch as it’s going to be local only.
Create a new virtual machine with a single hard disk. For the purposes of this test, I’ve assigned 2 vProcessors, 1GB RAM, 30GB drive for the OS, 1 vNIC in the default vSwitch0.
In the past, I would often say to my wife, “if it’s not in Outlook, it isn’t going to happen”. Increasingly it’s “if it’s not on my iPhone, it’s not going to happen”. The fact is that I can’t actually remember all the things that I need to do each day, I need reminding!
I spend perhaps 8 hours a day at my work PC, maybe 2 hours a day on my home laptop and my iPhone is with me pretty much 24/7 – all of which are both data sources, and data endpoints. They all remind me to do things. To add a bit more complication to the mix, some things are personal, some things are work related.
As is normally the case when I’m studying, I haven’t had time to post much on here lately. I’ve been studying to pass the ICND1 exam (snappily titled “Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices Part 1”)
I’m really pleased to say that neglecting this site paid off, or rather the study did – I passed with a score of 930! It was a LOT harder than I had expected, I thought I’d walk out after 20m! It does now mean that I am CCENT. I’ll be taking the ICND2 exam early in the new year which will move me up to CCNA.
I’m currently in the process of migrating a 2-host High Availability cluster of ESX 3.5u4 servers to vSphere 4. This is going to come in 3 distinct stages: Stage 1 is to upgrade VirtualCenter Server 2.5 to vCenter 4, which I am going to cover today. Stage 2 is to upgrade each host, and will be covered as I do it. Stage 3 is the upgrade of the Virtual Machines to the latest VMware Tools and then the new VM hardware.
If you have an Alternate Access Mapping configured for a MOSS 2007 site with Integrated Authentication you might find that you get prompted for the DOMAIN\UserName and Password. After 3 attempts you get to a HTTP 401 error.
This can be resolved by following the steps in MS KB 896861
I’m migrating some hosts off of an older storage LUN, but when I drag the disk to the new Datastore with the SVMotion plug-in the job fails with the following error:
The error occurs because the virtual disk cannot be moved without moving the source files, the .vmx, .vswap etc. Simply drag the entire VM, rather than the virtual disk to the new Datastore.
I ran into a slightly confusing problem today - our SQL servers are all created with 4 disks on 4 separate LUNs (System, Swap, SQL Data and SQL Logs). When viewing the server through Virtual Center I couldn’t see all of the LUNs, just the System LUN. It’s not a major problem as the VM can see the storage, but a little annoying when you have to remember what LUN the disks are on.
Here’s the setup. We have a core switch of 2 Cisco 3750s, connected together for fault tolerance as a single logical switch; we also have several ESX 3.5 hosts with 4 Gigabit Ethernet NICs installed each. The Virtual Machines will all be on VLAN 8 (reserved for internal servers) and the VMKernel will be on VLAN 107 (reserved for VMKernel traffic like VMotion). I want to create a load balanced, fault tolerant aggregate of these four NICs over the Core Switch.
I recently resolved an ongoing DNS issue where the Active Directory Integrated DNS was loaded in both the Domain and the DomainDNSZones partition of AD - this is a separate issue and should be resolved differently. My problem when I tried to verify that the fixed DNS setup had propogated around my domain controllers, DC01 and DC02. DC01 kept failing “DCDIAG /TEST:DNS” with errors regarding the root hint servers. Googling about it was clear that a lot of people were suffering the same issue, but no article I read had correctly identified the solution.
