Nerdzone – a new category on my blog

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Just recently I stumbled across a tweet from VMware, showing some virtualized operating systems on a Red Hat system:

I didn’t know that VMware software was running on Red Hat. I know the earlier ESX Server which you could install on Windows Server (something like VMware Workstation, but for business workloads), and I know the early ESX bare-metal hypervisor. But I wasn’t aware of Red Hat running VMware software. But there’s always something new to learn, isn’t it?

That led me to the fact that I have to install some old operating systems as well, just to see if I’m still able to do so (with some of them, it’s not just Next, Next, Finish) and if they can run on modern virtualized hardware. And they do!

I’m not sure if I’ll install more old operating systems. Probably I do. But I decided to create a new blog category here, called the “Nerdzone”.

I’ll put everything into this category which has to do with tech, but it’s not directly related to other categories on my blog. For example, I’ll put a blog post here where I’m writing about the installation of old operating systems, like a guide or something.

Until this blog post, and some other will come, this is just an announcement for now 😉

My website just got an update – speed and design

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“A long long time ago, I can still remember how…”

You all know that song. It’s now two years ago when I moved my website the last time from one provider to another. And no, this blog post doesn’t talk about another move. It’s just a small update on how my website is performing and what I did the last few days and weeks to make it perform and look better.

Back in April 2018, I published a blog post about my website now being serverless. The reason why I wanted to go serverless was website performance. I stumbled across some Tweets, talking about the search functionality on a website, not using a word or tag cloud, etc. All of this has led to the fact that I have dealt with the topic more intensively and at that time moved my website to a new hosting provider. In the end, I decided to go serverless with my website. But that wasn’t easy. I love WordPress as a blog tool or publishing platform, or whatever you would call it. It is easy, flexible, and you can do so many things with WordPress.

But WordPress is based on PHP for the frontend and MySQL as the backend database. And that’s all dynamic content. Each blog post you read, every function on the website will be executed or rendered dynamically. That’s not speaking for high performance directly. There are some techniques, such as caching plugins, or other tweaking tools, to make the website performing better. But it’s still dynamic content in the end.

Read moreMy website just got an update – speed and design

Working with templates in vSphere 7

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One new great feature in vSphere 7 is template versioning. You heard that maybe already somewhere, or read it on various blog posts shortly after the announcement of vSphere 7.

I recently had to restore some of my Windows templates because something went wrong. Then I said, why not try out the new template versioning? Well, it’s easier said than done. I’ve found out that working with templates in vSphere 7 isn’t much of a difference than it is in vSphere 6.x. It’s also not a big difference when working with content libraries. But there are still some differences and maybe even limitations. I’ll update this post when I find out more about this. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, or it is a bug like the one where VMs and Templates view doesn’t show folders after two levels in vSphere client (KB 78693).

What is vSphere template versioning?

First, it’s a great feature! With vSphere 7, you can now have multiple versions of a template. For example, you create your base template, then there’s the next version when you install patches and updates, and so on. If there’s something wrong, you can revert to the previous version of your template. Also, if you’ve got a huge template chain already, you can delete the oldest versions of your template. In my humble opinion, there is some space for improvement when working with templates and versioning. But I’ll show you later what that means.

How to work with the new versioning?

As far as I have tested it, you can’t convert existing templates to a template with versioning enabled. I mean there is no button like “convert that template”. It’s a manual task. That counts for templates that are stored somewhere on a datastore connected to your ESXi host as well as for templates that are stored in the content library. But as I already mentioned, maybe I’m just doing it wrong (hopefully not). And in case this should work, I’ll find it out and update this post.

How to work with template versioning then? It’s pretty easy. You set up your virtual machine and do everything you need to prepare it as your VM template. Michael White has some great posts about creating VM templates. Let’s assume that you’ve got your VM ready for the next steps.

Read moreWorking with templates in vSphere 7

Bulletproof tip on how to find the right Windows VMDK

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I did this so many times already, and I never thought that I could document it, or put it somehow into a blog post. And maybe you already know how that works, how you can find the right Windows VMDK to resize it.

It’s not that complicated if you know what to search or look for. And it’s easy as pie when the VM has only one disk, or maybe two. But imagine a SQL server, which has like eight disks or more, depending on its setup or software recommendation? Then it might get tricky to catch the right VMDK at the first shot.

But this bulletproof guide should help you out! Maybe that gets a new category, bulletproof. We’ll see. But let’s get back to the main topic here.

How do I find the right Windows VMDK?

I deliberately write Windows because I only work on Windows machines for that blog post here and not Linux VMs. It might get another blog post for that sometime in the future. But that depends on the Linux distribution or flavor because Linux is not Linux (don’t hate me please). But there are Debians, RPMs, Unixes, and so many other derivates. Not always the same tools available, not the same commands or syntax. You’ll get the point. Let’s focus on Windows VMs for now.

So, you’ve got that huge VM with several disks, and you have to resize one of them. Lucky you if it’s the C: drive because usually, that’s the first VMDK. Usually. But this guide shows you how to find the right VMDK. And always, making the disk bigger is easier than shrinking it. So it’s better to find the right candidate in the first shot, isn’t it?

Read moreBulletproof tip on how to find the right Windows VMDK

Backup and Restore vCenter Server Appliance

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Just a few weeks ago, vSphere 7 saw the light of day. And people went crazy! New ESXi servers with vSphere 7 have sprung up like mushrooms. So many people directly upgraded their homelabs, or maybe even their production systems.

This blog post, I know the last post is some time ago, will show you how you can backup your vCenter Server Appliance with their integrated backup functionality, and also how you can restore it, in case something went wrong. Except for two ways, I went through all options for backup targets and tried to find out how to configure it. So there should be at least one way how you can back up your vCenter data to a proper location in your data center.

Why is it a good idea to back up your vCenter

vCenter is your management central in terms of virtualization. You manage all your ESXi server with it, your clusters, your data center networking maybe (with NSX), you’ve got some automation running, got your host profiles, storage policies, etc. in place there. Why lose all the stuff you’ve configured over a longer period, with maybe much tinkering, try and error? Backing up vCenter is not so hard. You need a backup target, a user and a password. In vCenter 6.7 you can even schedule the backup, which makes things even easier than before, where it wasn’t possible to configure a schedule.

Supported protocols for backup

vCenter supports the following protocols for backup:

  • FTP
  • NFS
  • SMB
  • FTPS
  • SCP
  • HTTP
  • HTTPS

This guide will show you how to configure all of the above protocols, except HTTP and HTTPS. I didn’t see a sense in setting up such a configuration in my lab, because it doesn’t seem to me as such backup targets would exist in a company either. I also think that these two protocols might be the slowest, compared to all the other protocols available. In data centers, no matter if on-premises or cloud, the often-used protocols are NFS and SMB. So chances are high that there might be already a suitable backup target for vCenter. Or it can be easily created. Also, FTP is still commonly used, and we’ve got also secure options with FTPS and SCP.

Backup performance

To be honest, the backup performance was not my top priority. I wanted to configure and test all supported protocols except HTTP and HTTPS. It’s clear that performance matters, at least to a certain degree. Backup windows might be small, or systems should not be impacted with a heavy load. Before we move on, I’d like to show you how the performance was during my tests.

I’ve set up a new vCenter server appliance for this backup and restore test. It is a tiny deployment with 2 CPU, 10GB memory and default disk size (thin). There is nothing configured within vCenter, no hosts, no clusters, nothing except backup. You can see that the amount of data transferred is the same in all tests. In regards to the duration, we’ve got the SMB protocol on the first place, followed by FTPS on the second, and NFS on the third place. Yes, I’m aware of “but there’s ftp:// and not ftps://”. I’ve configured FTPS as you can see later on the screenshots, but when I executed the backup job, it was logged as “ftp”. You can spot the difference at the port used for FTPS.

Read moreBackup and Restore vCenter Server Appliance