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.
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.
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!
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
HTH,
Sam
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.
If you’re trying to move a 2nd, 3rd or nth disk and you get this error, drag the entire VM as per above over to the new Datastore, once that’s completed, go back in to SVMotion and drag the whole VM across again, only this time before you apply, drag the nth disk back to the new Datastore.
A.K.A Why not to use snapshots 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.
I recently had an issue where a hosting environment was registering a lot of Netlogon Event 1030/1058 issues, being unable to find the Group Policy objects or download them. In this example, the server DC is the domain controller for DOMAIN.LCL.
_Event Type: Error
Event Source: Userenv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1030
Date: 10/09/2009
Time: 06:24:29
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: DC
Description:
Windows cannot query for the list of Group Policy objects.
Why should a home user backup? Most don’t, most people just have their photos, music and video collection on a single hard drive, maybe an external drive or even a USB key. Unfortunately, no-one ever thinks about what they’d do if their drive were to fail, losing all their precious holiday snaps, their slightly embarrassing music collection, or perhaps their family finances. But stop and think for a second – can you really replace those holiday snaps?
