Ready, Set, Virtual!

Year: 2018

  • VMware vExpert 5th Year in a Row

    4 years ago, I decided to take the plunge at applying for my first year as a vExpert. I thought I was just shooting into the open air not thinking I would receive an award. I had only just started getting into virtualisation, having only done a small amount at work, but I was enjoying the technology so much I decided I would start blogging along my journey. Not long after starting that path, I started to attend our local VMUG chapter and then went on to be a leader for a couple of years. More and more I grew into the VMware virtualisation family.
    It is with great honour today to accept my 5th year as a vExpert. This program has been running for 10 years now and is there to acknowledge those who provide back to the VMware community. This program has given me so much, in terms of resources and community support to get the most out of my virtualization journey and to continue to grow and learn more and more each day.

    Why is this program so special? I’m glad you asked! The program is not only designed to acknowledge publicly those that spend their time blogging about why you should have High Availability turned on, but to use the vExperts as a valuable resources for testing Beta’s for VMware and providing feedback to improve the GA version.  As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the program enables each vExpert to engage in the community as one and this encourages one another to persist push the limits of their blogging, their knowledge and skills. The team we have are a reliable and trusted group who individually, but also together produce content to help the community in their own environments.
    There are additional benefits we receive as vExperts, such as invites to internal VMware calls,  private BETA testing and licenses to be able to continue testing and producing content. These benefits only push you to work harder and create bigger and better content.
    I love being part of this select group. and I want to thank Corey Romero and the vExpert/Community team at VMware for giving me and all this years vExperts the opportunity to be a part of the program once again.

  • Configure ESXi 6.5 Autostart

    I’ve recently rebuilt my homelab, and as part of bring a nested lab, I like to have my nested host VMs to poweron automatically as I do for my VCSA. However, I configured (Or at least I thought I had) the Autostart option on sll 3 of the nested hosts. After sitting down powering on the physical host, I waited approximately 10 minutes for it all to boot up, which is about normal, unfortunately, I could not connect to anything but the physical ESXi host, to which I found all 3 VMs powered off all with AutoStart option on them.

    As you can see above, all VMs have Autostart enabled on them with their start order, and yet they are all powered off. What I found was that there is a separate service for Autostart that need to be enabled before the start order will operate.
    To enable:
    Select Manage -> Autostart -> Edit Settings
    Under Settings, select Enable = Yes -> Click Save


    Once completed, restart your ESXi host to ensure the settings are operation.

  • Extended Unstun Times with VVOLs and Veeam Proxy Fixed in 9.5 Update 3

    Recently Veeam released Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 Update 3″ This update has brought a number of fixes and additional features that you can read about in Anthony Spiteri’s post VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION 9.5 UPDATE 3 – TOP NEW FEATURES
    This particular release brings a welcomed fix for backing up VVOL backed VMs when using a proxy server. The symptoms occur when you backup a VM that is utilising VVOL storage and a proxy server with hotadd. The snapshot attempts to remove too soon before the HotAdded disk finishes its unbind process. When this occurs the VM can freeze anywhere from a number of seconds up to 80+ seconds.  These issues were not present when the backup proxy was on the same host as the VM that was backing up. The workaround prior to this release was to run in NBD mode which uses the host as a proxy and is a slower method.
    So, what am I looking for? The most obvious symptom is when your VM freezes and can not perform any actions, however performance graphs, etc all should a healthy VM. The other is in your VM log file, you will find a line similar to below. this is a standard line in your log, the difference is the the length of time the process runs for.  In this sample: 56 seconds

    Checkpoint_Unstun: vm stopped for 56223314 us

    In Veeam B&R 9.5U3, you can now add a registry value to set a wait time to allow the unbind from the proxy to complete before the snapshot is removed. to do this, open up your Veeam B&R server -> Open RegEdit -> navigate to:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\

    Create a new REG_DWORD: HotaddTimeoutAfterDetachSec
    Using decimal set your wait time (value) in seconds for how long you require.
    Once added, you can restart your server\services for the settings to take affect. After testing overnight with a few Backup jobs, I re-enabled all jobs to run through proxies and  have not seen any issues yet.