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Month: November 2016

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance

In the previous Part I of the series, I described the installation process of external PSC in vSphere 6.5.  In this part I’ll go through the process of vCenter Server appliance deployment. The first step is to download the vCSA ISO image and mount it for instance to your desktop. Inside the ISO image go to D:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 and run the installer.exe. (This is the same ISO image used for PSC deployment). Then we choose the Install option, as you can see there are also…

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vSphere 6.5 Security Enhancements  

vSphere 6.5 Security Enhancements  

  In this article I will try to point most important security enhancements in recently released vSphere 6.5 platform.  As we can hear from “pre GA” sneak peek information VMware will build security in 3 areas: Secure access – logs monitoring and audit Secure infrastructure – hypervisor with minimal footprint = minimal attack surface and cryptographic option to provide SecureBoot Secure data – hypervisor-level encryption for VM data Let’s go deeper  into the  technology – below is a list of…

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VM Hardware 13 ?

VM Hardware 13 ?

During the tests of new vSphere 6.5 you will quickly realize that the virtual machine created in compatibility mode for 6.5 has VM Hardware Version 13. It could be quite strange in case we had version 11 in vSphere 6.0. Perhaps it means that VMware at first planned to release vSphere 6.1 which would use VM Hardware 12 but finally skipped it in favor of the vSphere 6.5. Anyway to be able to use new features of vSphere 6.5 you…

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 1 – External PSC

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 1 – External PSC

This is the first part of the series describing the different options to install, restore and upgrade vSphere 6.5, especially the vCenter server. In this part we will describe the process of External PSC deployment. 1.The first step is to download the vCSA ISO image and mount it for instance to your desktop. Inside the ISO image go to D:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 and run the installer.exe. 2. Then we choose the Install option, as you can see there are also available such option…

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vSphere 6.5 GA is now available to download!

vSphere 6.5 GA is now available to download!

That’s the day most of us ( or at least me :)) were waiting for. It’s officialy available to download vSphere 6.5 GA. It can be downloaded directly from this page. Documentation can be found here. The most important features are: HTML 5 vSphere Client ProactiveHA Network-Aware DRS vCenter Backup and Restore Auto Deploy integraded with Web Client vSphere Update Manager built-in vCenter Server Appliance. General Storage, NFS and Network enhancements I guess that there aren’t many of you who…

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Increase VMware ESXi iSCSI storage performance ? – lets demistyfy all tips and tricks

Increase VMware ESXi iSCSI storage performance ? – lets demistyfy all tips and tricks

  Before we start I would like to describe main motivation to write this article which is quite simple – to gather in one place all basic theoretical background about iscsi protocol and best practices at its implementation on vSphere platform with special consideration about potential performance tuning tips & tricks . This is first part of the series where We (I’m counting on readers participation) try to gather and verify all this “magical” parameters often treated as myths by…

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VLAN Discovery Failed

VLAN Discovery Failed

Sometimes you can see plenty of strange entries while observing vmkernel.log related to FCoE. It won’t be unusual if you use FCoE. However, if you don’t you could be a little bit curious or even worried about it, the timeouts or “link down” entries aren’t normal for most of vSphere Admins. The problem could be seen when you are using some kinds of converged network cards. In my case it was HPE C7000 with Virtual Connects and Qlogic 57840. It’s…

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ESXi host connection lost due to CDP/LLDP protocol

ESXi host connection lost due to CDP/LLDP protocol

You can observe some random and intermittent loss of connection to ESXi 6.0 host running on Dell servers (both Rack and Blade). It’s caused by a bug with Cisco Discovery Protocol /Link Layer Discovery Protocol.  It can be also seen while generating VMware support log bundle because during this process these protocol are also used to include information about the network.   What are these protocols for? Both of them perform similar roles in the local area network. They are…

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