Last week I received a copy of Mike Laverick’s new book: “Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0″. Just in time actually since I was finishing a project with a customer where I implemented VMware vSphere 5 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Gave me a great opportunity to check if the book would help me solve some issues I ran into while deploying SRM 5.0.

First let me start by saying that the book is very well written, as with the previous books Mike wrote. A very useful part is chapter 2 through 6 in which Mike walks with you through configuring replication for Dell EqualLogic, EMC Celerra, EMC Clariion, HP StorageWorks P4000 and NetApp SnapMirror. Very useful because these storage basics are essential for understanding VMware SRM much better. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  No Comments »

Past two months I’ve received three calls from customers who’s vCenter suddenly stopped working because their SQL database had stopped because the logs had filled up. Turns out few people regularly check the status of their SQL database. VMware has written some very good KB articles on what to do when your SQL DB fills up and stops. So this blog post is only a wake-up call for you to check on your database.

Some good KB articles from VMware on this subject:

• Purging old data from the database used by vCenter Server
• Purging old data from the database used by VirtualCenter 2.x
• Defragmenting VirtualCenter performance data indexes on a Microsoft SQL database
• Investigating the health of a vCenter Server database
• Migrating an existing vCenter Server database to 4.1 using the Data Migration Tool
• Migrating to vCenter Server 5.0 using the Data Migration Tool
• Starting the VMware VirtualCenter Service service fails with the error: Windows could not start the VMware VirtualCenter Server on Local Computer

From Josh Atwell I got this tip: Size Matters, especially when your database is full.

by Gabrie van Zanten.  3 Comments »

MAASTRICHT AIRPORT – Februari 2012 Open Line will open the doors to their new datacenter in Landgraaf (Limburg, the Netherlands) as an extension to their current Cloud solutions portfolio.

The mission statement of Open Line is: “To be your reliable and innovative partner for your technical ICT domain”. Data centers have a crucial part in all core activities of a company. Currently Open Line has two datacenters running. Because of a continues growth of services delivered from these two data centers, extending the data center capacity was inevitable. All 95 employees are proud to be part of this important strategical step towards a complete self owned datacenter next to the already existing data centers at Maastricht Airport.

More info to be found on the Open Line website [Dutch]

Website: www.OpenLine.nl

by Gabrie van Zanten.  No Comments »

Eric Siebert has once again started a poll to ask people to vote for their favorite VMware & Virtualization blogs. On his vSphere-Land page you can see the results of the previous voting. This year Eric has added some extra categories for which you can vote.

When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  No Comments »

Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a vSphere Standard license, you might run into an issue with DRS where the affinity rules stay in effect.

As best practice we usually put the vCenter VM on the first host in the cluster using a VM to Host affinity rule in DRS. A few days after entering the vSphere Standard license which doesn’t allow DRS, I tried to move the vCenter VM to a different host, but this wasn’t allowed because a VM to Host affinity rule was still active. When checking the cluster settings, DRS was still disabled. When I enabled DRS, without clicking OK, I could see there still was a host-affinity rule defined in the settings. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  3 Comments »