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
As some of you read previously, I had been experiencing disk latency issues on our SAN and tried many initial methods to troubleshoot and understand the root cause. Due to other more pressing issues this was placed aside until we started to experience VMs being occasionaly restarted by vSphere HA as the lock had been lost on a given VMDK file. (NOT GOOD!!)
The Environment:-
3x vSphere 5.1 Hosts
The voting is now open for your favourite VMware virtulization blogs over at vmware-land.com
With 200+ blogs now up and running with content covering every aspect from PowerCLI to VDI, technical deepdives and general VMware topical blogging! there is a very strong chance you will have read an article in at least a few of them.
Today while creating new VMs from a template I got the error “the server fault invalidargument had no message” when editing the VM settings, the settings were modified successfully but the error was present whether a change had been made or not to the settings of the VM.
A quick search of the web suggested removing said VM from the inventory and re-adding from the datastore, for many this fixed the issue but not for me.
This year for me personally has been extremely busy and eventful coupled with a great deal of learning.
Without wishing to bore the pants off of any would be reader I shall summarize my ruminations as someone whom is still quite new to the VMware world.
The first thing that comes to mind is a a couple of recent meetings I have had with VMware. Learning that they are now very keen to engage with ’the rest of us’ and by that I mean those of us working in SME’s as we represent well over 50% of their business revenue.
So recently we upgraded our cluster monitoring suite to it’s latest iteration (Veeam ONE), it was not long before I began to receive emails from the monitor informing me of Host disk write latency “errors” (Datastore write latency had exceeded the defined threshold in the monitor) on several of the Datastores on our SAN.
Naturally I began the process of cross referencing backup routines and any heavy I/O routines that may have been running at the time the warning messages were generated.
Firewalls being used – Sonicwall 3500 & Cisco 506e
Several months ago we relocated and it was then necessary to setup a Site to Site VPN tunnel with another network. (In this instance the other network was not directly managed by us)
Upon the creation of the tunnel and after successful traffic tests all looked well. However after several hours or less in some cases traffic stopped flowing yet both firewalls reported the tunnel as “up”.
As with all things IT the pace of technology change is relentless and we are constantly and rightly told that change is good and that being able to evolve and move with the times is an important skill and ability.
However I am often left wondering how we can maintain a balance. I have all to often seen IT professionals falling into the trap chasing the latest and greatest and rushing to try to implement or learn new emerging technologies without much thought to what they already have.
I am a firm believer in trying to keep things simpler where ever possible (but not for the sake of it) In years gone by I have heard many admins lament about the complexities of deploying IIS to work alongside third party plugins such as PHP. I can remember numerous occasions where I have wrestled with the config and “best practice”.
I am however glad to say finally Microsoft have taken notice of this and produced a very simple and effective deployment toolkit.
So here we go, my very first tech blog… so what on earth do I start with?
Given I am unlikely to have any profound revelations I shall simply focus on what I have discovered as useful and helpful on my travels!
First up then…
I have been asked on many occasions by individuals and SMEs should they opt for a brand such as HP over Dell or vice versa… as ever my default response is a brief needs analysis.
