VMware Octopus wallpaper
Duncan over at Yellow Bricks was nice enough to share this VMware Octopus wallpaper. Of the VMware wallpaper I have this one is my favorite for some reason.
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VMware Workstation 11 Announced
VMware has just announced that VMware Workstation 11 will be released as general availability come December 2014! VMware Workstation 11 will offer support for the latest version of Windows and Linux operating systems, running on the latest CPU’s and computer hardware while also now able to connect to VMware vCloud Air!
Another CBT bug found in VMware ESXi 6.0
VMware just published KB 2136854 regarding a new bug found in ESXi 6.0 that causes virtual machine backups, which use Changed Block Tracking (CBT), to be inconsistent. VMware says the cause of the issue is this:
This issue occurs due to an issue with CBT in the disklib area, this causes the change tracking information of I/Os that occur during snapshot consolidation to be lost. The main backup payload data is never lost and it is always written to the backend device. However, the corresponding change tracking information entries which occur during the consolidation task are missed. Subsequent QueryDiskChangedAreas() calls do not include these missed blocks, hence a backup based on this CBT data is inconsistent.
Restore a VM using the {vm}-flat.vmdk file
A couple days ago I was asked the question “An admin deleted the vmdk file associated with a VM, there are no snapshots or backups of the VM . Can we restore this VM somehow?“. I believe in backups, I like to have my VM’s backed up so that I can depend on them for events just like this very issue. At first I was stumped, until the {vm-name}.flat.vmdk was mentioned. That’s when I remembered a method to recover a VM using the vm-flat.vmdk file that I had actually done 2-3 years ago.
How to setup NFS on Synology NAS for VMware ESXi lab
I’ve been asked several times how and why I setup my home lab to use NFS on my Synology NAS and thought a post detailing the steps would be best. First the why, when I purchased my Synology DS412+ about two years I recall seeing several people stating NFS was out performing iSCSI (like this post) on the Synology. It was strictly from reading other peoples findings that I started with NFS and have continued to use NFS without any issue. In fact I’ve been very happy with my DS412+ in a RAID 10 setup.
How I setup NFS on the Synology for my ESXi homelab is pretty simple as well.
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My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade
Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.
For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.
At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.
I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.
So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!