Monthly Archives: May 2015

One year blogging

So my blog is now one year old!!!

Unfortunately I didn’t get any cake for myself. I bought the domain back Feburary 2014, and setup the WordPress blog official on 4th April 2014. Since then, its been a kick ass ride producing content, appearing as a guest blogger on other sites and generally earning appreciation and respect from my peers.

Originally I planned to create educational content for budding system / IT admins to pass the CompTIA A+ Exams, as I used to be a lecture to mature students teaching the CompTIA curriculum. Producing content for online consumption and possible print is hard work, and I’ve yet to find time to properly dedicate myself to this, so instead of making a half-ass attempt at it, the idea has been shelved for now.

Instead I just blog stuff from my day-to-day work that I think would be helpful to others. Or because I know I’ll need to use the info in the future (my most used post is adding HP repo’s into VMware update manager)

first birthday

 

The Highlights

So here’s some of the highlights from blogging or that’s come of my blogging

Continue reading One year blogging

2015 05 11 15 17 57

vCenter 6.0 Client Application GUI bug – VM’s showing Snapshots?

Today I’ve noticed that when using the vCenter C# client, each VM shows up as allowing for “Revert to current snapshot” and “Consolidation” however there is no open snapshot on the virtual machine.

2015-05-11_15-03-40

Above we can see clearly the options to “Revert …” and “Consolidate” are available, but when looking at Snapshot Manager, they are is nothing apparent.

2015-05-11_15-03-53

Looking into the configuration of the VM, there is no number string appended to the file name for the hard drive, i.e -00000001.vmdk as you would usually see for hard drives of a VM that is running on a snapshot

2015-05-11_15-04-17

If I bite the bullet and try to revert the snapshot or consolidate the VM, the vCenter task comes straight away, but the options are still available.2015-05-11_15-05-25 2015-05-11_15-05-52

Logging into the Web Client, you can see these options are not available for the VM.

2015-05-11_15-12-00

This means that it must be a GUI based bug in the application. As VMware are trying to phase out the application, I am not sure if they will resolve it.

Update – it is a known issue

2015-05-12_10-54-43

 

Frank Buchsel is a Technical Support Engineer for VMware, and his blog is brilliant! I urge you to check it out.

Regards

Dean


backup error

ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes

Post update 14th May 2015

VMware have released a hotfix KB2116126.

Removed information regarding old CBT workaround for Veeam is incompatible

_________________________________

So it’s come to my attention that the new and mighty ESXi 6.0 has a CBT fault as well. This time its effects are different than previous versions, but causes you backups to either fail, or take a considerably longer time to complete.

Here is the official KB from VMware: KB2114076 – Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0 (2114076)

The Cause

Below is VMware official note on the issue, which isn’t very promising, and will affect any backup technology using snapshots within VMware.

This issue occurs due to heap exhaustion when attempting to enable Change Block Tracking (CBT). 

If a virtual machine with a large number of virtual disks reached an upper threshold, enabling CBT fails because of heap exhaustion. This issue also occurs with multiple virtual machines with CBT enabled. In case of Windows virtual machines with VSS enabled, taking a quiesced snapshot creates double the amount of memory overhead.

Note: The virtual disks can be spread across virtual machines or can be in a single virtual machine.

2015-05-11_11-47-46_01

You can look in your VMKernel.log from the host the affected VM is on to see various warnings about CBT.

WARNING: CBT: 191: No memory available! Called from 0x418010db750e

Here I’ve used the System Centre Configuration Manager Trace32 Tool for viewing the VMKernel.log

2015-05-11_12-09-42

Continue reading ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

Veeam Endpoint – Connect to a Backup Repository

I am going to quickly detail how to connect Veeam Endpoint to an existing Veeam Backup and Replication Server to use a backup repository.

Covered is;

  • Pre-Reqs
  • Setup the permissions on your Backup Repository
  • Setting up the Backup Job
  • Integration into Veeam Backup and Replication Server GUI
  • Troubleshooting
  • Resources

Pre-Reqs

First off, you need;

And a suitable machine to run endpoint on.

 

Setup the permissions on your Backup Repository

It’s best to do this first, open up the GUI for Veeam on your Server.

1. Go to Backup Infrastructure > Backup Repository > Hold CTRL + Right Click on your repository object.

Veeam-Endpoint-2015-05-05_16-57-54

2. Add your users that can access to repository, usually this will be the main user or service account used for Veeam Endpoint on the remote device. In my case, the Windows 7 machine runs LOB software for compatibility reasons, so a service account is used.

Veeam-Endpoint-2015-05-05_16-57-44

Note: you can also configure encryption as well.

Setting up the Backup Job

1. Double click the icon in your task bar, or open the control panel of Veeam Endpoint and click to configure backup.

  • Select your backup type

Veeam-Endpoint-2015-05-05_16-44-15

Veeam-Endpoint-2015-05-05_16-44-29

 

2. Select the destination as “Veeam Backup & Replication Repository”

Continue reading Veeam Endpoint – Connect to a Backup Repository

veeam 2014 logo color tag

Veeam VMCE v8 Exam Experience

I’ve completed and passed the Veeam VMCE v8 exam, having done the v7 exam some time ago.

vmce_logo

The official deadline is 15th May, to upgrade from v7 exam to the v8 exam, miss this deadline and you need to take the full course within 90 days and pass the exam to keep your status, anything after this your status will end as a VMCE and you will need to take the full course and exam to re-ignite it. So basically after the 15th May you need to take the full course.

2015-05-05_14-59-33

To be completely honest, I wasn’t that impressed by the course and exam for version 7, and had our partner status with Veeam not relied on me doing the exam, I wouldn’t have bothered this time around.

Course Material

Continue reading Veeam VMCE v8 Exam Experience