Newsletter: November 29, 2014

Hello all,

I hope everyone has had a good week?  Pretty short for those of you in the US.  I had an empty office to work in Thursday and Friday.  Very productive but lonely and quiet.  Thursday - Thanksgiving, I had to head out for lunch and it was tough to find.  Chipotle, MacDonalds, Five Guys, Panera, and a bunch of other places were closed.  I can find more places open at home on Christmas!  Since the last newsletter I have had a number of articles published on a variety of subjects.  Of particular interest for me was how Backup Exec was not retiring backup sets that were outside policy.  I filled up 3 TB pretty fast!

Another important one is about my tool of choice for doing file migrations.  I talked about that here but the short answer is not Robocopy.

BTW, I am trying out a new tool to help with writing my blogs.  It sort of got away from me recently and sent an empty tweet.  Sorry about that.  There is already enough empty tweets out there!  This tool was on sale on Black Friday and it seems pretty darn good.  With a bit more experience I will write about it.

Lots of things today and I hope something for everyone - have a great week everyone!

Michael

Something worth reading - The TechReckoning
Most weeks I get a copy of John’s email newsletter.  Here is one  and they are always interesting.  You can check out the archive or sign up.  I do suggest you checking them out as I quite enjoy them.

View 6.x Event Database performance is slow
If you are working in View 6.x and find the Events slow to work with there is an easy fix - you need an index.  Article doesn’t mention if this is common or not but I think it might be.  Maybe a best practice for partners when they are installing View for customers?

Horizon View 6.0 Application Publishing
Here is the start of an excellent series on publishing applications in View 6.0.  This is something I have not seen done much of and I am glad that Sean has started on this.  It is cool functionality and it is too bad people are slow to adopt it so hopefully this will help.  Thanks Sean!

Back to basics SRM - Part 1 - Site Pairing
As of SRM v5.8 SRM is part of the vSphere Web Client.  Finally - right?  The dev guys demo’ed it to me a long time ago.  Glad it is finally out.  Here is the start of a series on configuring SRM in v5.8.  BTW, here is an article about things to watch out for when installing SRM.

Configuring EMC RecoverPoint for use with SRM
The RecoverPoint gear is very popular in the world and for some good reasons.  It can provide replication between different types of arrays and support SRM for DR work.  Here is some help for configuring RecoverPoint to work with SRM.  And isn’t it cool that it is almost available as an appliance, and that it is free for non-production use?!

Log Insight 2.5 - Content Packs
Log Insight 2.5 is not out yet, but will be soon I hope.  Steve has two nice articles about updated content packs in LI 2.5 and about the content pack marketplace and how you can access it via LI 2.5.  Nice!

vSphere Audit Trail with Log Insight
In this article you will see what to search for and alert on with respect to an audit trail of user actions in ESXi and vC.  Pretty interesting.

Operationalizing VSAN:How to configure alarms
This is a great article about how you can configure alarms in your virtual infrastructure when there is no pre-configured alarms for VSAN (yet).  Check out the list of potential events you can alarm on and you will see at least a few that you need for sure if you are using VSAN.

VSAN Backup using VDPA
Actually the real title is VMware Virtual SAN Backup using VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced.  I sometimes think marketing people get paid by the letter. What do they have to make big long names when short ones work fine?  But, in any-case, this is a nice technical whitepaper (TWP) on backup of virtual machines running on VSAN using VDPA. There is some good background on VDPA and how it works as well as some good things to think about when backing up VMs on VSAN.

Recreating a missing VMFS partition in vSphere 5.0 / 5.1 / 5.5
This is something that you will not need often, but if you ever need it you will need it bad.  How you can lose, and re-create a VMFS partition.  Wow.

Nice PowerCLI script - detailed host info
Here is a very nice script that pulls a lot of stuff down about a host.  A really good snapshot of info that would be good in an audit type circumstance.

Monitoring VMs FTW!
Here is a nice example of an IT guy being proactive through the use of vC Ops and custom dashboards.  Nicely done.  Check it out here.

Centos 7 and vmxnet3 network
I am almost ready to provide access to our engineers to my lab.  So they can check things out and see how our product works in a  customer realistic environment.  And of course they want Linux.  So they will end up with a Windows desktop and a Linux box.  That Linux box will be Centos v7.  And it turns out that VMware Tools is not suggested for it.  Plus some other odd things.  Check out the info here - this is different from Centos v6 where you did normal VMware Tools.  So if you use Centos you should check out the article.

SolarWinds Lab videos
I listed to my first SolarWinds video from their Lab guys and it was pretty good. Here is a sample and they have a lot of them.  They are all about using their products in the real world.  As you may have seen I recently got both Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager in my lab and they are pretty interesting.

Fight the FUD - My Checkbox is bigger then yours!
I saw this and found it pretty interesting.  I did not know that a vendor could be certified for VAAI-NAS  and yet not pass all the tests and not support everything.  So another example of the buyer needs to be aware!  But then saw this that covers off the block side of the house.  The morale of this is to remember to use the HCL but also research a little and make sure you know what you are doing!

vSphere Web Client plugin for Custom Attributes
I was a big fan of Custom Attributes in the past.  Who owned or supported the VM, for example was very handy.  But when I started working with the vSphere Web Client long ago I switched to using tags.  For those of you with a rich history of Custom Attributes can now see them in the vSphere Web Client if you choose to.  Check it out here.  Very nice!

A good reminder from Duncan - Validate your hardware config when it arrives
Duncan has a very good point about validating your hardware config when it shows up.  I do a memory test overnight on almost every physical server I have setup.  Plus after it is running I do a variety of HA and vMotion tests, and even DPM tests as well.  And this is all my testing, and done before any of the ‘official’ customer tests.

Finding location of failed vCenter Login
A great story about a problem that has hit many of us over the years.  Some really good points in the story too - things we can all learn from.

Free VMware Training - vRealize Orchestrator for vRealize Automation 6.1 Fundamentals
This is complex stuff and it is very good indeed that there is some free training.  This won’t help you install, or design, but it will be a good start for learning about consuming.

Troubleshooting vShield Endpoint performance issues with Anti-Virus software
I do believe that slowly over time more and more customers will not put anti-virus / firewalls / IDS or IPS in an operating system.  Just is not as good a solution today as it was last year.  However, when you use one of the four or five vendors that can currently use hypervisor supported anti - malware it can be a little tricky to troubleshoot.  This KB article will help you with that.

Veeam Backup & Replication v8 Upgrade
I did my v8 upgrade this week and it was so easy and quick I did not document it.  Upload the v8 ISO to a datastore and mounted the ISO on my Veeam VM.  Answer some questions, and start Veeam, answer some questions and you are done.  If someone thinks I should have documented it I will next time but it was pretty easy.  You can find release notes and what’s new here - near the bottom of the page.  If you are new to v8 and need help install check this article out.  BTW, once you have upgraded your old jobs new a slight tweak to improve - new jobs not necessary but see this for more info.

Veeam on Windows 2012 R2 - Don’t forget about Large Size Records
I did in fact even though I had read this.  But I am not using dedupe on my repository drive - although I am not sure if that is related.  I will try using dedupe in the future.  But not sure if I really want to format as large size records as I am unfamiliar with that.  Here is some good info on using dedupe in Win2K12.

Veeam ONE v8 Install
I have not done much with ONE but I found a nice article to get it working in this.  It is as easy as B&R is for an install.  Nice.

Duncan’s VMUG Recommended Session Viewing
Recently Duncan spoke at a couple of VMUG’s and they recorded the sessions and he has put together an excellent list of videos to check out.  I am working my way through them - all good stuff!  This is really worth checking out.  I spoke recently at a VMUG and it was not recorded - which is too bad as we had a lot of fun!  But these guys were and are talking about important stuff so we are lucky to catch up.  BTW, here is a link to Duncan’s presentation from his video.

We are DevOps
I have heard the phrase DevOps in a number of places.  I think the best example was in one of the dev groups I worked with at VMware.  They had an actual DevOps team.  2 or 3 guys but they were IT ops for developers and they did it differently.  They delivered a wonderful service to the developers.  With automation, and in fact proactive stuff.  But I have heard IT managers talking about moving their IT guys to DevOps.  He thought it was a course or a product.  Duncan talks about this - sort of - in his article.  BTW, he suggests watching a keynote that Joe Baguley did and he is right.  Quite good.

Want to know more about NetApp ONTAP 8.3
Here are two different articles that will talk about what is in this newish release - here and here.  One of them has links to some very useful NetApp docs.  NetApp has come a long way!

Where have all the good people gone?
This is written by one of my co-workers and it shows some of the interesting functionality in our storage appliance.  Amazing what can be done when you simply use our storage for your storage.

Stop - who goes there?
Another nice article by one of my co-workers on an interesting example of what is possible with a DataGravity appliance.  Gabe shows off how DataGravity can find and show abuse of a service account.  That is something I have seen too and why I have always used very complex passwords on service accounts.  A feature of AD that is new and that I have not used is managed service accounts where AD automatically changes the password.

A new Free CA
A free CA would be handy I think as more people might use it.  It might be easier to do more home lab cert testing and playing too.  I heard about this here.  When I learn more I will let you know.

Radically Simple Hypervisor Upgrades
This is a pretty interesting article   It is about how Nutanix will upgrade your vSphere or Hyper-V hosts for you.  While I am a big fan of VUM and think it does pretty good, this is a very interesting idea.  They do more about making it a safe upgrade then VUM does.

Migrating File Servers from Windows 2003 to Windows 2012 R2
This is an interesting article about migrating from a Win2K3 file server to a Win2K12R2 file server.  Quite well done.  I suspect it might help as I think there is a few customers still out there using Win2K3 and it is time to upgrade or migrate.

Backblaze and Time Machine equal nice backups!
I use Backblaze myself and like it a lot.  I also use Time Machine as well.  I consider TM to be a nice tool to recover a file from quickly and easy and Backblaze to be my offsite copy and it all works pretty good.  Backblaze talks about TM in this article.  BTW, I have use Carbonite, Mozy, Crashplan in the last bunch of years and I like Backblaze the best.  Great price / service and very nice technology that is mostly in the background.  Nice blog too!

iPhone Slo-Mo to not Slo-Mo
I heard someone talking about this but did not actually understand it much until I read this article   If you have taken some Slo-Mo video on your iPhone and don’t want it to be Slo-Mo any longer it is a little harder to do that then it might seem.  So that explains why the article!

Keeping up with the Snoops 7: Too many Snoops
I like what this guy writes and I like how he has links often to prove what he is saying is right.  Definitely interesting - especially if you are rabid conspiracy guy - remember this?

Want to learn more about Continuity?
Have you had your iPad, iPhone and Mac all ring with an incoming call?  What about start writing an SMS on your iPhone and finish on your Mac?  Pretty cool stuff.  But if you want to learn a little more about how it works, and what works, here is an interesting article.

Fixing a primary display issue
I wanted a TV display in my home office to use as a monitor.  We do that at work in conference rooms and it is pretty handy.  However I had a problem doing it with my laptop.  I had my laptop connected to a Thunderbolt display (what a great investment that is!), and then my laptop connected to the TV.  The TV become my primary display.  Meaning all my folders moved there, and applications opened there.  Not at all what I expected.  And once that happened, even when I disconnected the Thunderbolt it was still like that.  I found something on the internet to help with this and reset your primary display.  Really helped!

Thanks for reading or skimming this far!

Michael

=== END ===