Category: VMware [en]

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Lockdown Book Project: vSphere 7 – The compendium

I had the special pleasure of working on a book project as co-author in the past months. It is entitled “VMware vSphere 7 – Das umfassende Handbuch” (“VMware vSphere 7 – The Compendium”, published in German language) and will be published in November by Rheinwerk-Verlag. It is the 6th updated and extended edition of this series.

This book covers a wide range of vSphere 7. From basic architecture to setup and day-2 operations. It helps novice and advanced IT administrators understand the principles of vSphere, network virtualization with NSX-T, vSAN, container workloads, VMware Cloud Foundation, Hybrid Cloud, and SDDC.

My contributions are the completely new written chapters Monitoring and vSAN. The chapter Monitoring is about giving the administrator an overview of the integrated monitoring tools and how to use and interpret them. It also introduces VMware and third-party tools. The vSAN chapter explains the fundamental structure of this storage virtualization and explains the special features of a vSAN cluster in comparison to conventional storage solutions.

It was a pleasure to work on this book with a team of experts.

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VMware vExpert 2020 application (2nd round)

The VMware vExpert program is VMware’s global evangelism and advocacy program. The vExpert program was designed by VMware to reward community members for evangelizing VMware’s products and services. Each year the title vExpert is awarded to people who have contributed to the community in an outstanding way. That can be bloggers, book authors, public speakers, VMUG leaders, VMTN contributors, VCDX and other IT professionals who share their knowledge.

Application

Application opens twice a year. Currently the second half application is open from June 1st to June 25th.

Why to become a vExpert

Yes there are benefits (I will come back to that later), but that’s not the point. Being a vExpert is not about what to get, but what you can give. Many vExperts put a lot of their spare time into the community. Preparing a blog post, a VMUG presentation or organizing a VMUG meeting consumes a lot of time. For those community warriors is the vExpert program.

Since I’ve joined the vExpert program I made a lot of friends in the community. I also witnessed a very warm welcome as a newcomer by seasoned vExperts. To name just a few there was Ather Beg from Britain, Andreas Lesslhumer from Austria and Vladan Seget from Reunion Island.

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Veeam Storage Plugin for DataCore – Deepdive

Any questions, remarks or additions: melter[at]idicos.de

SANsymphony meets Veeam Backup and Replication – true love in the end!

In December 2019 the plugin for the popular DataCore SANsymphony SDS was finally released. And it is done in the only proper way: With full support and validation by Veeam.

In this article series we will cover several aspects of the plugin:

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Host Upgrade fails with “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

I recently had the pleasue to time-warp a dinosaur upgrade an old ESXi 6.0 host to ESXi 6.7. Right after I triggered remediation with a current ESXi 6.7 iso image, I got an error message:

Cannot execute upgrade script on host

That message isn’t really specific. If you google it you’ll probably find a dozen possible reasons tor the failure. That can be:

None of the issues above did fit my observed problem. A good startpoint should be a look into vua.log on the affected host.

less /var/log/vua.log

Unfortunately that didn’t help either. So we had (again) a closer look at the VMware upgrade path matrix. A direct host upgrade from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.7U3 is supported but while we re-checked the matrix our attention was drawn to a little footnote.

KB 76555 says there’s an issue with expired VIB certificates on hosts below a specific build numer.

  • ESXi 6.0 GA before build 9239799
  • ESXi 6.5 GA before build 8294253

In fact our ESXi host 6.0 had a build level of 7967664 (U3e) which is in the critical range. So we had to install some patches up to July 2018 (ESXi600-201807001). After that the upgrade to ESXI 6.7U3 went flawlessly.

What went wrong?

Of course we did check the matrix during the planning phase in early March 2020. That’s a standard operating procedure. Unfortunately something has changed in the meantime (the footnote was added). KB 76555 was updated in May 2020 and the issue affects upgrades to versions of ESXi 6.7 beyond April 28th 2020.

Take home message: Check your design and matrices again right before the projects starts.