VCP6-DCV certification
Posted on February 27, 2017
After months of studying (some more than others) and running labs, I finally commited to the VCP exam and passed it succesfully. This industry-recognized certification validates that you know how to administer and troubleshoot vSphere V6 infrastructures, leveraging best practices to provide a scalable and reliable virtualization platform for...
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How to reduce the cost of your VMware infrastructure
Posted on January 27, 2017
Since the start of virtualisation as we know it, two CPU sockets configurations were the obvious choice since it allowed to increase density and run more VMs on a single server, saving in the meantime money on the other components such as RAID controllers, network cads/HBAs, chassis, disks, you name...
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Don't bother with IPs, ping VMs
Posted on January 4, 2017
One thing that we all do quite regularly is pinging servers. In a medium/big environment there can be a lot of VMs and I can’t remember all the IP addresses or even the hostnames, which is annoying when I want to ping one of them. It’s still easy to find...
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How Power management impacts ESXi performance
Posted on December 21, 2016
Recently at work we’ve been noticing erratic performance on VMs eventhough the host’s CPU wasn’t running particularly hot. In order to check if there was contention I looked at the DRS chart and discovered that the CPU, not even hitting the 50% bar was not delivering half the resources. The...
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PowerCLI 6.5 broke my Powershell custom prompt!
Posted on November 22, 2016
This blog post applies only if you have a customized Powershell prompt. Function Prompt { … } in Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 EDIT 03/03/2018 The new version of PowerCLI support module auto loading so you don’t need to worry about importing the modules anymore. My Powershell profile...
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vSphere 6 host randomly disconnects from vCenter
Posted on October 17, 2016
I got a few email alerts recently from my vCenter regarding host not responding and disconnect at a random time. At first I tried to find a pattern for what could be potentially causing the issue and quickly realized that nothing funny was happening in vSphere-land. So I had a...
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Convert LUN canonical name to datastore and vice versa
Posted on October 13, 2016
Someone recently asked in a VMTN post for a way to know what datastore is associated with a LUN canonical name (naa.xxxxxx). It can actually be quite annoying to find which datastore we are talking about when all we have is a canonical name. It’s either putting on the...
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Snapshot consolidation: vsphere 5 vs vSphere 6
Posted on September 23, 2016
Prior to vSphere 6 the consolidation mecanism worked such a way that it could lead to issues where the consolidation of snapshots would fail and retry over and over again and could lead to crazy long stun times with unresponsive guest OS or a snapshot that doesn’t want to go...
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vExpert 2016 program
Posted on September 21, 2016
A couple weeks ago VMware sent over the emails to notify the new and returning vExperts 2016, and it is with great pleasure that I received mine! The vExpert program is an “award” given to the professionals who get involved in the VMware community by sharing...
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Hyperion + Lightberry + OpenElec + Kodi
Posted on August 15, 2016
I did this project to create a mood lighting behind the TV that “follows” the colors displayed on the screen and enhance the experience of movie watching. It is pretty much an open source version of Philips’ Ambilight except it can work on a wide range of devices and is...
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