VMware

VMware vSphere – How to find floppy images (paravirtual SCSI)

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Paravirtual

Today’s blog post is about some tricks and treat. It’s soon Halloween, folks… Today i’m working in my vSphere homelab. I tried to create a virtual machine. Well, that wasn’t that complicated. More complex was to find the floppy images for providing the PVSCSI driver. You’ll need this driver when you’re creating a paravirtual SCSI storage controller within your virtual machine. A quick search provided a good VMware knowledgebase article which helped me. Gathering the floppy images was then easy as pie.

You can’t access the “vmimages” folders through storage browser, it shows to be empty. This is an expected behaviour because the vmimages search through vCenter Server is turned off in ESXi 4.0/4.1. And i just assume that it’s also turned off in newer ESXi versions, like 6.0 which i’m using in my homelab. Because i actually can’t find the “vmimages” folder. For my case i installed all my nested ESXi hosts from scratch, manually, so there shouldn’t be any issue. This should also happen in production environments.

But now lets start to gather this folder. How do you get your hands on it? Let me show you.

Start putty and connect to one of your ESXi hosts (SSH service has to be enabled in the security profile / firewall on your ESXi host).

Run these two commands to create a folder on a datastore where you whish to store the images:

[sourcecode language=”plain” gutter=”true”]mkdir /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/floppies
mkdir /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/vmtools[/sourcecode]

Where <datastore_name> is the name of a shared datastore.

Run these commands to copy the contents of the original source folder to the newly created folder on the shared datastore:

[sourcecode language=”plain” gutter=”true”]cp /productLocker/floppies/*.flp /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/floppies/
cp /productLocker/vmtools/*.iso /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/vmtools/[/sourcecode]

Now you’re able to mount the floppy images in your VM to get access to the paravirtual SCSI driver.

Happy virtual machine creation, and Happy Halloween too 😉

Halloween

VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 4 – Closing Sessions

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VMworld

Yesterday was the last day of VMworld 2016 in Barcelona. It was a great day for me personally because of all those nice chats with people which i look up upon. I learned much this week, learned much about technology, future trends and i met some really nice and kind people. It’s somehow sad that it’s just one week of VMworld. But with all the early wake up at morning, walking throughout the day and probably the one or another party the evening it’s also little exhausting. Let me provide you a short overview what was on my schedule yesterday.

VMware Hands-on Labs

I took another hours to get some experience with the VMware Hands-on Labs (VMware HOL). This is a great opportunity to learn something about a product which you don’t know much about, but it’s also great to know more about an already known product. I took the labs for VSAN and VMware Horizon View. In my homelab i’m already used to work with VSAN, but i didn’t know much about Horizon View. We use it in our company to enable our technicians an easy way to connect from on the go or at home to some virtual desktops, looking at customers network documentation or doing all the reporting stuff. Now i’ve got some little more insights about that great product.

Meet the experts

The afternoon i’ve spent with chatting and exploring the solutions exchange, and too for gathering some schwag, you know that, Kev 😉 I had also the chance to get into a close circle of people (we were three) to have a chat with VMware’s senior technical marketing engineer Emad Younis about the new version of VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). We took a look at the deployment of Platform Services Controller (PSC). And now we know to keep the deployment flat and simple. Another VMware specialist joined in, we had also a talk in the same session with Mike Foley, VMware’s guy for security of the core platform (vSphere). There we had a short insight about securing the Web Client with RSA tokens.

vSphere Troubleshooting made easy

The last session which i attended was “vSphere Troubleshooting made easy”. Well, what we saw at the presentation wasn’t that easy i think. Lots of CLI commands, lots of useful tools most people probably don’t are aware of. It was a technical deep dive in my opinion, but it was a good one. I’ll do a blog post about this session in a short while, because i think you should know some of that stuff. If you don’t had any issues with your vSphere environment then you’re a lucky guy, but you probably can too take some benefits from the following post.

Conclusion about VMworld week

This week was one of a kind. Exhausting, interesting, informative and sporty at the same time. I met some really kind persons and i’m looking forward to meet them at another time at another VMworld. But i’m starting too to miss the mountains in my home country. So one week is probably enough.

Special thanks go to Kev, Ather, Gareth, Chris, Chris, Chris, Amit, Fred and Andi. You are cool guys and i really enjoyed the time with you. You gave me some good insights about certification and how to not fail again 🙂

And another special thank you goes to CloudCredibilities CloudCredGeeg Noell. Thanks for your support in the labs and the nice memories i can take home 🙂

Please read the other VMworld posts to:

VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 3 – Announcement Overview

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VMworld

Today in the morning i will provide you a short overview over the recently made announcements here at VMworld Barcelona. VMware announced some long expected new product versions at the general sessions at VMworld. Lets look a little closer.

vSphere 6.5

vSphere 6.5 is the foundation of next-generation infrastructure for your next-generation apps. Decrease CapEx and OpEx, simplify data center operations and increase business efficiency through virtualization.

Learn more >>

vRealize Suite Cloud Management Platform

The enterprise-ready cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Suite, delivers a complete solution for managing private, public and hybrid clouds. And there is a 25% discount to on this solution for some time, take advantage of this limited time opportunity.

See what’s new >>

Workspace ONE Essentials

It’s all about the digital workspace. Work from from anywhere from any device. The new Workspace ONE Essentials delivers a customer-simple experience, integrating single sign-on access to web and mobile apps. Starting at 4$ per user and month at a cloud subscription its fairly attractive to get started with Workspace ONE Essentials.

Read more >>

What’s new >>

Photon Platform: Built for Cloud Native Workloads

Photon platform is an enterprise cloud infrastructure platform. Give your developers the tools and services they need to build and run modern applications, while retaining control and security of your data center. Enjoy an intuitive and easy-to-use REST API, CIL and HTML5 user interface. Deliver on-demand access to high available Kubernetes clusters, scaling up or down with zero maintenance.

Discover more >>

Read the announcement blog post >>

Virtual SAN 6.5

Virtual SAN is the storage platform used in the hyper-converged systems. With version 6.5 VMware delivers new capabilities. Consolidate your data center silos, accelerate responsiveness and deliver extensibility to meet future cloud and cloud-native demands. Virtual SAN enables you to respond 10x faster, reduce TCO by 50% and makes you ready for scaling to tomorrow. Virtual SAN 6.5 now brings iSCSI access to non-virtualized workloads with iSCSI support. You can also connect to nodes togehter (2-Node Direct Connect) to save up to 20% per ROBO site. It supports the next-generation hardware, like large capacity drives with 512e support.

Get the details >>

Thats it folks for the moment. Stay tuned for more to come!

Please read the other VMworld posts to:

VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 2 – Solutions Exchange

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VMworld

An awesome day finds his end after visiting the VMworld Solutions Exchange today. At day 2 at VMworld you can visit the Solution Exchange. Here you will find the many booths from different hardware and software vendors, VMware partners and more. I circled mostly around the Veeam booth today and walked around to get a rough overview of this overwhelming presentations all around.

Veeam at VMworld booth #P207

I’ve learned some great new things today. How about using the ReFS filesystem on a Windows Server 2016 as a backup repository for Veeam? It gives you so many benefits, you just want to get started with it. Fast cloning gives a real boost to the synthetic full backup. This feature doesn’t move or copy files, but instead references just the backup file blocks already existing on the filesystem. Another great new feature is the spaceless full backup. You can now have more full backups on disk which are sharing the same data blocks. You can lower costs for backup storage and get more speed than using deduplication storage (data rehydration process). Last but not least the data integrity streams. Veeam Backup & Replication enables data integrity streams automatically. These streams are used in the background by ReFS data integrity scanner. It scans your whole archive and not only the latest restore point. As Rock Vanover says: “storage-level corruption guard feature on steroids”.

When Veeam Backup 9.5 is generally available i’ll do some more detailed blogging about these new features. Veeam is my first choice backup and availability software, even at the customer or in my homelab.

Intel at VMworld booth #D303

I’m getting used to SSD disks (solid state drives). They are much faster then normal spinning disks and the price per gigabyte comes down more and more. I’ve got them in my home computer, in all of laptops and running also an all-flash vSphere homelab. Today i visited also the Intel booth here at VMworld and got a nice deep dive about actual and future SSD development. They had a 8-node vSphere cluster running completely on NVMe disks. It delivered about 750k IOPS when they did the benchmark for several hours. Did you know that you can, depending of the Intel SSD model, write 2TB to 8TB of data daily for about five years? Five years of constant writes, with full manufacturer warranty!

This was it, my short overview over the day.

Please read the other VMworld posts to:

VMware Certification – How to fail the third time at VCP exam

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My journey to VMware certification began in October 2013. Yes, i’m relatively new to that. I work at a system integrator as a system engineer, supporting customers from 50 to 150 users. The main support runs over my table, ranging from printer with paper jams to virtualization infrastructure. All of them use VMware virtualization in a smaller scale. It isn’t the American small and medium business size here in Switzerland. Its more a European SMB or at least a Swiss one. With me are also working about twenty people, half of them in sales and administration, the other half in technics. We are a VMware partner on the level of Premier Solution Provider and Enterprise Service Provider. Just 50 cents to my history and background.

Why am i doing that blog post?

Why am i blogging about my three fails in the VCP exam? Well, there is one good reason for me. Keeping self motivation and getting more of it!

In October 2013 i failed the first time, trying the VCP5-DCV exam. Exactly two years later i failed the second time at the same exam. And today, when i attended VMworld 2016 in Barcelona i took another chance to get certified. And failed miserably. Ok, that sounds harsh. But its annoying. Learning, reading, watching videos, doing courses and since a few months having a small homelab too didn’t help me to prepare so that i can pass. It shouldn’t be an excuse. But all these features questioned in the exams we are not using at our customers. They are just to small for that. And troubleshooting is not each time knowing the exact CLI command or so. Its researching and trying out.

Meet people at VMworld

Attending VMworld is not only good for seeing hardware, listening to keynotes and collecting swag. Well, that too. But not only. At VMworld you can meet people from different countries, from different companies and with different knowledge. And today after failing the exam i had some good talks to exactly those people. I know them since few months from Twitter (also a good way to “meet” people and stay connected) and VMworld was a great chance to meet these people live, personally. These people can answer your questions like no one else can do. These people are highly certified, decorated and honored in many ways. And they failed sometimes too on the exams. And they can give you tips for the preparation for your certification. This benefit i took with me today.

Special credits

I’d especially like to thank to Kev Johnson which motivated me to jump over my shadow and do this special blog post. He and his VMUG buddy Chris gave me some great insights, tipps and knowledge how to better prepare for the next try.

Guys, thank you very much!