The last few weeks have been quite busy. Time to focus on exam preparation again. Let’s start with the first objective of the second section. This blog post covers objective 2.1 (Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017). The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).

This blog post covers objective 1.3 (Determine risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017). The first objective of the exam prep guide has covered the business requirements. Now we have to do similar for the affected applications. The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).

This blog post covers objective 1.2 (Gather and analyze application requirements) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017). The first objective of the exam prep guide has covered the business requirements. Now we have to do similar for the affected applications. The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).

This is a situation that never should happen, and I had to deal with it only a couple of times in more than 10y working with VMware vSphere/ ESXi. In most cases, the reason for this was the usage of thin-provisioned disks together with small datastores. Yes, that’s a bad design. Yes, this should never happen. There is a nearly 100% chance that this setup will fail one day. Either because someone dumps much data into the VMs, or because of VM snapshots.

Sorry for the long delay since my last blog post - busy times, but with lots of vSphere. :) Today, I did an upgrade of a standalone vCenter Server Appliance at one of my healthcare customers. The vCenter was on 6.0 U3 and I had to upgrade it to 6.7 U2. It was only a small deployment with three hosts, so nothing fancy. And as with in many other vSphere upgrades, I came across this warning message:

THIS IS FIXED in ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3. See KB67426 (Performance issues with Windows 10 version 1809 VMs running on snapshots) for more information. TL;DR: This bug is still up to date and has not been fixed yet! Some user in the VMTN thread mentioned a hotpatch from VMware, which seems to be pulled. A fix for this issue will be available with ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3.

Yesterday, I got one of these mails from a customer that make you think “Ehm, no”. Can you please enable the TPM on all VMs. The customer The short answer is “Ehm, no!”. But I’m a kind guy, so I added some explanation to my answer. Let’s add some context around this topic. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a cryptoprocessor that offers various functions. For example, BitLocker uses the TPM to protect encryption keys.

I was onsite at one of my customers to update a small VMware vSphere 6.0 U3 environment to 6.5 U2c. The environment consists of three hosts. Two hosts in a cluster, and a third host is only used to run a HPE StoreVirtual Failover Manager. The update of the first host, using the Update Manager and a HPE custom ESX 6.5 image, was pretty flawless. But the update of the second host failed with “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

While building a small Citrix NetScaler… ehm… ADC VPX (I really hate this name…) lab environment, I noticed that the fan of my Lenovo T480s was spinning up. I was wondering why, because the VPX VM was just running for a couple of minutes - without any load. But the task manager told me, that the VMware Workstation Process was consuming 25% (I have a Intel i5 Quad Core CPU) CPU.

It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials. [caption id=“attachment_3841” align=“alignnone” width=“625”] Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies[/caption] Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss.