Posts - Page 24 of 31

Cisco OTV Lab with Multicast example

October 22, 2014 / Martijn / 2 Comments

Cisco OTV (or Overlay Transport Virtualisation) is a technology inside Cisco Nexus switches (7K) for extending VLANs across a routed network. You can read all about OTV here and here. This post consists of an example configuration for a lab where you have a single Nexus 7K and you want to get OTV over multicast running between VDCs and comes from my CCIE study notes for when I was practicing with OTV. I’ve heard some people have issues with getting the multicast configuration working, so I figured I would share mine here.

First off, to create the illusion of … Read more

VMworld Europe 2014 Recap

October 19, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMworld Europe is the event of the year for me. A week of meeting up with all kinds of IT professionals from around the world. I believe there were around 9,000 people from 90+ different countries. Apart from all the interesting people, it is geek heaven for anyone interested in virtualisation.

Being a techhead first, I always go head first into the technical sessions. This year, I attended around 18 break out sessions mostly about VMware NSX and automation subjects. Being a hybrid engineer (network & virtualisation), I thoroughly am enjoying what is happening in the networking space around virtualisation. … Read more

VMware NSX Best Practices from VMworld

October 18, 2014 / Martijn / 2 Comments

There were a lot of technical sessions on VMworld about VMware NSX. 30 sessions were about or touched on NSX and interest (the queue for the waiting list) were enormous, a lot of people wanting to know more.

As a network guy, my VMworld was mostly about NSX as well. I joined 7 sessions to get more acquainted and learn about best practices in designing virtual network environments. This post will summarise these best practices. As soon as the VMworld presentations will come online, I will update this post with the actual network diagrams.

Cluster Design (types)
VMware NSX … Read more

vRealize Operations Manager (previously vCOps) 6.0 “Almost Here”

October 14, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) has been given a new name: vRealize Operations Managers (vROps) and VMware has completely reworked the old vCOps. It has a 8X greater scalability and offers unified management across vSphere and non-vSphere (Hyper-V, AWS, Bare Metal) platforms.

vROps now comes in a single virtual appliance, instead of the known virtual appliance with the “Analytics” and “UI” VMs inside it. No more two different management panes as well. The changes so far are pretty impressive for a 5.8 to 6.0 release. Here they are:

New Scale-Out Architecture – Data and UI are shared so no separate “Analytics”

VMware Site Recovery Manager Updated to 5.8

October 13, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

This one has gone a little under the radar, but VMware has updated its Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 5.8 and bringing a few remarkable updates by doing so:

SRM has been fully integrated into the vSphere Web Client (used to be fat-client only).
Scalability limits have been increased dramatically:
- Maximum of protected VMs is now 5,000.
- Maximum of concurrent recovery tasks is now 2,000.
You can now map entire subnets to the IP customisation plans, instead of individual IP addresses.
There is now an VMware Orchestrator Plugin for SRM to automate SRM actions through Orchestrator.
SRM can now

VMware NSX on a FlexPod (with dynamic routing)

October 8, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco has made it clear that there will be no validated design for a FlexPod with VMware NSX running as the virtual network and there will be no trifecta vendor support for the entire platform. This does not mean you’re completely barred from using it though. To be able to make use of the best of both worlds, I’ve been working to create a design that uses FlexPod as the rock solid foundation and offer the networking flexibility that VMware NSX offers. The goal is to not change the FlexPod design so that it will still be certified for support.… Read more

Cisco UCS B-Series CPU Upgrades – WILL_BOOT_FAULT

September 21, 2014 / Martijn / 3 Comments

UCS is different then other server platforms, which sometimes makes simple maintenance tasks not as straightforward as you’d think. We had an truckload of CPU upgrades last week. A regular server admin would think; “Hey, I just take this old CPU out and put this new CPU in and bob’s my uncle!” – well, UCS might have a surprise for you.

One of my colleagues (a ‘traditional’ server guy) handled this replacement and was confronted with an error message when reinserting the blades: WILL_BOOT_FAULT (awesome description once again, Cisco). Considering the error message itself, they went looking for boot issues. … Read more

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Page 24 of 31