Thursday, August 28, 2014

Final day!

I am so far behind, it is not even funny, but in my defense it has been a whirlwind couple of days! I was starting to get a little disappointed with what I was seeing this time around at VMWorld. There was something that I thought was missing and I could not put my finger on it. 

Yesterday I found it. CloudVolumes. With what I have been involved with at the office I was looking for something that would improve the user experience with View. This is definitely what I was looking for! You can use a vmdk file that has applications installed to standardize a department build, without having to install it into the base image. Of course that is over simplifying.

There are also other things coming up....Project Meteor , and Project Fargo both looking to make the vdi environment even more. There are so many good things coming! 

The party last night was pretty cool. I was thrilled to be able to be part of the paper airplane toss for charity. This to me was something very positive that VMware is doing and I applaud them for it.

#VMWorld #VMware

Monday, August 25, 2014

End of day report

Lots of info in the sessions today! View 6 sounds to be very promising, with it being configured out of the box to give 30% bandwidth savings right out of the box! 

The log viewer that VMware is offering sounds like a heck of a product too! Being able to pull logs from more than just your ESXi servers; it can pull logs from your SAN, Fiber Switches,Network Switches, Windows machine and much more. It also give you the ability to not only pull those logs, but you can correlate outages that happen and you can filter out everything but error and warnings if you want. Not to mention the fact that you can download filter packs from VMWare to help making diagnostics even easier.

The general session did have some great info, but let's face it, the general sessions are VMWare's time to rah rah about everything that is coming and remind you exactly how many buzz words they know. I don't know about all the other shops out there, but our shop has decided it will keep its infrastructure in-house so that being said I will not feel guilty about not jumping on VMWare's cloud chariot and racing of into the wild blue younder! 

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Shake, Rattle and Roll!!!

Wow! You know VMWORLD is gonna be great when the first thing they do is wake you up with a 3:30am wake up call that can shake down the house!! Naa....I know that VMware had nothing to do with the earthquake.....or did they?! 

Registration is done! Bag has been picked up....now time for some grub! Looking forward to hitting the labs here in a bit. As always VMware has done their best to make sure that the venues look great! The buzz is in the air and everyone is already talking about what tricks VMware has up its sleeve this year. 

Fully rested and looking forward to what the week has in store for me! 


Thursday, July 31, 2014

Unofficial VMworld 2014 Blogger List!!

Oh my goodie aunt! I made it onto the Unofficial VMworld 2014 Blogger List!! I am so excited to be able to attend VMworld again this year. The sheer amount of information that is given during this even is mind blowing! This is going to be my third VMworld, and I still can't wait to get there. So from August 23rd through August 28th, I will be giving my opinion about the up and coming technologies from VMware and other market leaders!



As always looking forward to meeting new people and old friends there. Hope to see you all there!

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Free Microsoft Books!

Had a colleague of mine send me a link to this today. So I figured I would share it with everyone else. Books can be really expensive so anytime I can find one that can be useful and free, I latch onto them!

Eric Ligman publishes a list of Microsoft books and has been doing so for a while now. This might not be new news for some of you but I thought it was great. So give him a follow on Twitter or Facebook or on his Blog, I am sure he would appreciate it!



http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2014/07/07/largest-collection-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-ever-including-windows-8-1-windows-8-windows-7-office-2013-office-365-office-2010-sharepoint-2013-dynamics-crm-powershell-exchange-server-lync-2013-system-center-azure-cloud-sql.aspx

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

NetApp, CIFS, vFilers and FTP

I had a moment of sheer stupidity, dealing with vFilers and CIFS on our NetApp. I was trying to setup FTP to our CIFS on a non default vFiler and was getting no where fast. Tech Support for NetApp left a little something to be desired too, as they really could not seem to get what I was trying to do and they failed miserably calling me back with a proper response. I finally figured it out through trial and error, so I hope this helps someone.

The trick to this is to under stand that when you make another vFiler, you have to run all the commands for the vFiler (ftpd commands and cifs commands), under the context of the newly created vFiler and all the files that need to be edited will be edited under the new vFiler as well.

I logged into the NetApp and typed vfiler status then hit enter. This gave me the names of the running vFilers

TESTSAN1> vfiler status                  
vfiler0                                    running
vfiler_test                              running

I then change the context to the "test" vFiler. This is where my and it seems NetApp's Technical support's confusion came in. 


TESTSAN1>vfiler context vfiler_test


the prompt at this point changes to the new vFiler.

vfiler_test@TESTSAN1>                  



At this point you begin to make the changes that you need to enable FTP on your vFiler. I typed options ftpd to get a listing of all the possible configuration settings that could be made to the ftpd service.

vfiler_test@TESTSAN1> options ftpd                

ftpd.3way.enable             off                                
ftpd.anonymous.enable        off                            
ftpd.anonymous.home_dir                                  
ftpd.anonymous.name          anonymous              
ftpd.auth_style              ntlm                                 
ftpd.bypass_traverse_checking off                       
ftpd.dir.override            /vol/TEST_DATAVOL 
ftpd.dir.restriction         off                                  
ftpd.enable                  off                                     
ftpd.locking                 none                                 
ftpd.log.enable              on                                   
ftpd.log.filesize            512k                                
ftpd.log.nfiles              6                                     
ftpd.tcp_window_size         28960                     




I enabled the ftpd service first.

vfiler_test@TESTSAN1> options ftpd.enable on         





I then changed the FTP authentication style. For my environment ntlm is what we needed but you can use unix, ntlm and mixed.

vfiler_test@TESTSAN1> options ftpd.auth_style ntlm         


If you are using ntlm you have to specify the CIFS home directory in the /etc/cifs_homedir.cfg that is located in the etc$ share of the CIFS. In my case the path was \\TEST\etc$ I opened the path by using Windows Explorer and used a text editor to edited this file. Using the examples provided in the file I was able to edit the path in the file and saved the file to the same place in the etc$ share. Once you have specified the CIFS home directory you then run the cifs homedir load.


vfiler_test@TESTSAN1> cifs homedir load        



At this point you can make any other changes that you need such as ftpd.locking or the ftp.dir.override. I was now able to successfully connect to the CIFS and so long as I have proper NTFS permissions I can FTP files to the locations that I need to.





















Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Provisioned Space and Used Space show 0KB

Ran into this issue earlier today when I was trying to get sizes of VMs in vCenter. A half of my machines were showing 0.00 B for their Provisioned and Used Space.


The solution was simple enough after scratching my head for a little bit. Select the server in vCenter and go to Configuration Tab. Select the Storage Adapters under Hardware. In the top right hand corner you will see Rescan All... click that and click OK at the next screen. vCenter will now fires off a rescan of your HBAs and your VMFS volumes and does a "Recompute Datastores Groups". Once that is done it should now show your Provisioned and Used Space without issue.

Sometimes it is the simple things that drive you crazy!!

ZOMBIES!!!! BRAINS.....

So I was running through the patching schedule with one of our other admins, when I decided to opened up RVTools and started looking at the vHealth tab. I was shocked to see :

As hard as we try to keep our environment clean, this was unexpected. What in the heck is a Zombie file? What are they doing? What the heck is causing them, and how can I get rid of them?!

Turns out a we had several different kinds of Zombie files. Our first kind was in our normal vSphere 5 Server environment, a snapshot that was not being shown in snapshot manager. Bizarre right? What they were doing is sucking our brains! Eh, ok so it was only eating up storage space on our LUNs, because they were not being cleaned off, and were causing the VMDK files to grow out of control. Same difference right? The second Zombie files that we had were being caused by our Horizon View VDI environment. These were different. These were old copies of our Virtual Desktops that hung around after we did recomposes.

The cause of the first set of Zombie files was a leftover snapshot from our EMC Avamar. Still investigating what happened here as this is not normal behavior but we do know it did it to a bunch of our VMs. The fix is fairly easy although it is tedious. Go to the VM take a snapshot, sometimes the new snapshot will fail but once it has failed it shows the old snapshot in the Snapshot Manager, other times it will succeed and you will now see two snapshots in the Snapshot Manager. Either way the solution is the same, select the Delete All in Snapshot Manager and wait for the snapshots to clear out.

The second set of Zombies, the VDI Zombies, were a little different. We had to go through the DataStores that we have assigned to Horizon View and check the dates on the files. Since we are using Dynamic Pools our VMs are recreated everyday, so we knew that if the files in the folder did not have today's date on them we could delete them. This was caused by creating "new" images. What we actually did was cloned our old golden image in an attempt to flatten out how many snapshots we had on it. Since it is technically a new Golden Image, the old folders that had the VDIs stayed out there, and the new ones were created as well. Again, another storage waste!

Now I know this probably all sounds very novice, but as I couldn't find anything on this with a "quick" 20 second look on the web so I figured I would share. Better policing of our DataStores is obviously needed! We are getting ready to implement (or at least demo) vCOps. Hopefully that will give us some more insight into these things, but still a HUGE shout out to RVTools !!! I love that tool! Great place to see little things in your environment that might not be right. It certainly saved my bacon!

Martin


VMWorld 2014!!

I am registered !!! Looking forward to seeing everything that has changed and being immersed again in all that is VMware!

I think I am going to take a crack at my VCP5-DCV while I am there. I haven't cert'd in a while so while I still can without having to take another class I guess I will get to it!

Hope to see you all there!