22Jan 2018 by mordi No Comments

VMware Home lab 2018

Home-Lab, vsphere65
Most of my study of new technologies happens in my home lab so I feel the need to upgrade the lab from time to time. I think having a home lab helps to increase knowledge and can help your IT professional career. I decided to upgrade my VMware home lab for 2018 and I would like to share the details. Bill of Materials(BOM): Three Servers:  DELL POWEREDGE R610 2x QUAD CORE E5620 2.4GHz 48GB RAM 2x 146GB 10K SAS. I purchased the servers on ebay for $294 each. Server Rack:  StarTech.com 25U Adjustable Depth Open Frame 4 Post Server Rack Cabinet with Casters/Levelers and Cable Management Hooks. I purchased the rack on Amazon for $249, I also needed to purchase some shelves for an additional  $80. Networking:  Cisco Small Business SG300-28 Switch - SRW2024-K9.…
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03Nov 2017 by mordi No Comments

vCenter High Availability Deployment and Testing in my Home Lab

Home-Lab, VCAP6 - Design, vcenter, vsphere65
Since I upgraded my home lab to vSphere 6.5 I wanted to test the vCenter high availably feature.  In this post we will discuss vCenter High Availability (VCHA) deployment (step by step installation) and we are also going to test the feature and see how the system is responding. So what is VCHA?: VCHA is a way to eliminate single point of failure when it comes to the vCenter appliance. The architecture of VCHA includes three vCenter nodes, active node, passive node and witness node, which serves as a quorum only. VCHA supports both embedded and external PSC configuration, and if you use external PSC configuration you will need to use load balancer when designing your solution (supported load balancers are Netscaler,F5 BIG-IP and NSX Edge). When you deploy VCHA,…
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04Sep 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 6 -Failover Re-protect and failback

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
In the previous posts we created and tested our recovery plan. at this point we know that we are ready in case we encounter a disaster at our protected site. In this post we will initiate a failover and failback to see if what we created so far actually works. Disclosure : All my Configuration and testing are made in a lab envioremnt so make sure to read and understand VMware documentation before using any of this information in a production environment. In this post we will perform the following steps: Run the recovery plan : When we running the recovery plan, SRM will migrate all the VM in the recovery plan to the recovery site in addition SRM Will shutdown our VM's on the protected site. There are two…
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07Aug 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 5 – Creating recovery plan and testing

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
Now that we've installed SRM in our lab environment and followed the SRM configuration tasks, we need to complete the last and most important step by creating a recovery plan and testing our recovery plan. The recovery plan that we will create in this post will control every step in the recovery process. If you followed the SRM Installation and Configure series on this blog, please make sure that you have configured the protection group from part 4 of this series, and also make sure that your replication is working correctly (we only use vSphere replication at this point). Creating Recovery Plan step by step: In the SRM window click on the protected site and then click on Step 6 "Create a Recovery Plan" Create a name for your recovery…
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06Aug 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 4 – Configure Protection group

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
In the previous posts we Installed SRM in our lab environment, we paired the two sites, we configured Inventory mappings and configured placeholder datastore. In this post we will continue with the configuration by adding protection groups The idea behind protection groups is to groups VM's and make sure they failover together to the recovery site. In SRM You can use protection group for array based replication and also for vSphere replication, in my lab I only configured vSphere replication at this point so I will demonstrate protection group configuration. Note: The following link is a good read on VMware blogs for SRM protection group design considerations: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/05/srm-protection-group-design.html Configuring Protection Group step by step: In the SRM window click on the protected site and then click on step 5 "Create Protection…
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06Aug 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 3 – Configure Placeholder datastore

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
In the previous post we Installed SRM in our lab environment and we paired the two sites and configured Inventory mappings. In this post we will continue with the configuration, if you look at VMware configuration guide the next step is to configure placeholder datastore. We need to configure a datastore on the recovery site which SRM can store the placeholder for VM's files, this datastore doesnt have to be big to contain the entire total size of the VM's In fact placeholder VM's files are very small. I wasnt able to find actual sizing document for the placeholder datastore but i did find a discuss on VMTN: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/514420 Note: You will need to configure placeholder datastore on both sites for reverse recovery Configuring placeholder datastore step by step: In the…
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03Aug 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 2 – Configure Inventory Mappings

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
In the previous post we Installed SRM in our lab environment and we also paired the two sites. In this post we will continue with the configuration. If you look at VMware configuration guide the next step is to configure inventory mappings. With Inventory Mappings we can specify how SRM maps the VM's resources at the remote site, the idea is that you use inventory mapping to dictate where in the protected site the VM's will be placed in case of a failure, you can map compute resources, VM folders and networks. So in the following examples we are going to set the following: Resource Mapping - With resource mappings you can map resource pools, standalone host vApps and clusters, You cannot map individual hosts that are part of a…
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31Jul 2017 by mordi No Comments

vSphere SRM 6.X Install and configure – Part 1

Replication, SRM, VCAP6 - Design
In preparation for the design exam we need to cover vSphere replication and SRM. I decided to create a lab to demonstrate the installation and configuration of SRM. On this blog, you can find more information about replication cover in the VCP/VCAP deploy sections The following are the configuration of the two datacenters used for my SRM lab Datacenter Name: EP-L1 Prod Objective: Replication Source Configuration: Using four ESXi servers in a cluster configuration   Datacenter Name: EP-Remote Objective: Replication target Configuration: using two ESXi servers in a cluster configuration   Note: At this point I will not use SRA’s, I will be using vSphere native replication Prerequisite: Make sure your DNS configured correctly Make sure your NTP configured correctly on all hosts, vCenter and VM’s Make sure vSphere replication is…
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13Jul 2017 by mordi 1 Comment

VCAP – Design: VMware vSphere Distributed Switch best practice notes

Networking, NIOC, VCAP6 - Design, vDS
In this post I will share my notes about VMware vSphere Distributed Switch best practice document in preparation for the VCAP Design exam. (Document link; https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vsphere-distributed-switch-best-practices-white-paper.pdf) Notes: The document is not updated to vSphere v6; some of the information related to v5.X only. The document includes a lot of useful information.  This post is only study notes; if you are not familiar with the technologies discussed in the document please read the document first. I have chosen to cover the rack server configuration only, but the document also cover blade server configuration Design Consideration: Goals: No single point of failure Isolate traffic type Use of traffic management and optimization Component configuration: Rack server with 8 1GbE NIC’s Rack server with 2 10GbE NIC’s Physical Switch – capable of switch clustering…
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01Feb 2017 by mordi No Comments

Updating my lab to vSphere 6.5 – part 2

Home-Lab, vsphere65
In the previous post we discuss the upgrade process for the vCenter appliance, in this post we will continue to update the lab to vsphere6.5 by upgrading the hosts. This process can be fully automated via VUM but i will like to take the manual route. Step 1: The first step is to upload the host image to a datastore that the hosts have access to and then connect the iso as a CD to the host Step 2: boot from a the CD and choose the installer from the menu, if you do not get the installer screen, check your bios setting (you might need to change the boot order) Step 3: Click enter to start the installation Step 4: accept the license agreement Step 5 : choose the…
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