Nearly a month ago, a tweet caught my attention: New Blog Post: Discounted VCP7-DTM Beta Exam for a Limited Time https://t.co/IkwLTDdvO5 — VMware Learning (@VMwareEducation) October 4, 2016 These beta exams are a cost-effective way to achieve certifications. The last beta exam I took, was the VCP6-DCV beta. Because I already had the VCP6-DTM on my to-do list, the new VCP7-DTM beta exam was released just in the right moment.

I wanted to retire my Synology DS414slim, and switch completely to vSAN. Okay, no big deal. Many folks use vSAN in their lab. But I’d like to explain why I moved to vSAN and why this move failed. I think some of my thoughts are also applicable for customer environments. So far, I used a Synology DS414slim with three Crucial M550 480 GB SSDs (RAID 5) as my main lab storage.

A few days ago, I ran into a very nasty problem. Fortunately, it was in my lab. Some months ago, I replaced the certificates of my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and I’ve chosen to use the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) as a subordinate of my AD-based enterprise CA. The VMCA was used as intermediate CA. The certificates were replaced using the vSphere 6.0 Certificate Manager (/usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager), and I followed the instructions of KB2112016 (Configuring VMware vSphere 6.

3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9. Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.

In my last post (Routed Port vs. Switch Virtual Interface (SVI)), I have mentioned a consequence of using routed ports to interconnect access and core switches: You have to route the traffic on the access switches. Routing on the network access, the edge of the network, is not a question of performance. It is more of a management issue. Depending on the size of your network, and the number of subnets, you have to deal with lots of routes.

Many years ago, networks consisted of repeaters, bridges and router. Switches are the successors of the bridges. A switch is nothing else than a multiport bridge, and a traditional switch doesn’t know how to pass traffic to a different broadcast domains (VLANs). Passing traffic between different broadcast domains, is a job for a router. A router has an IP interface in each broadcast domain, and the IP interface is used by the clients in the broadcast domain as a gateway.

Customers that use HPE 3PAR StoreServs with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 and VMware ESXi 5.5 U2 or later, might notice one or more of the following symptoms: hosts lose connectivity to a VMFS5 datastore hosts disconnect from the vCenter VMs hang during I/O operations you see the messages like these in the vobd.log or vCenter Events tab Lost access to volume due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and the outcome will be reported shortly

Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07. The copy sessions failed with this error: |Critical| From: BMA@<hostname> "" Time: <Date><Time> |90:6111| Error retrieving encryption key. The customer uses tape encryption. The destination for the backups is a HPE StoreOnce, and a post-backup copy creates a copy of the data on tape. Backup to disk was running fine, but the copy to tape failed immediately.

The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) was developed in 1998 as an open standard protocol. VRRP is the result of an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and it’s described in RFC 5798 (VRRPv3). VRRP was designed as an open standard protocol, but it uses some patents from Cisco. Its function is comparable to Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), or to the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP). VRRP solves a very specific problem at the network edge: It offers highly available virtual router interfaces, or in simple words: A highly available default gateway.

Sometimes you have to check when the last backup of an Exchange mailbox database was taken. This is pretty simple, because the timestamps of the last full, incremental and differential backup is stored for each mailbox database. You can check these attributes using the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), or you can use the Get-MailboxDatabase cmdlet. Backup successful, but no timestamp? Take a look at this output. As you can see, there’s no timestamp for the last full, incremental and differential backup.