North East VMUG–6/6/2013

Well it’s time again for the next North East VMUG.  The event will take place on Thursday 6th June from 12:30 onwards and will take place at:

CastleGate
Simpson Room
Melbourne Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 2JQ

Direction Here

The full agent will be posted up shortly but here are some highlights:

• Networking and Lunch
• Cisco Presentation: How Cisco Do IT
  Meet Richard Gore who will discuss how Cisco deployed VMware in their environment as the first step toward deploying private cloud, IaaS and PaaS in Cisco production data centers.
  Rich is a Cisco IT senior manager with 14 years’ experience in Cisco IT infrastructure architecture.  He has 30 years of IT experience at Bell Labs, AT&T, as a private consultant and now with Cisco IT.
  User Presentation: Virtualising SQL instances
• Rod Hope from BSkyB (and Scottish VMUG) will give a presentation on his real world experiences virtualising SQL Server.
  Rod has over 13 years’ experience working with some of the world’s largest investment / investment services banks and has recently joined BSkyB’s Operations Engineering group in an Infrastructure Designer role.
• VMware Presentation: “DR and the Cloud – To, From, Of”
  Meet Mike Laverick who will discuss the challenges of doing DR to the cloud, from the cloud and of the cloud.
  Mike is a real VMware A lister, having spent several years as an instructor and blogger, and written several books on topics such as vSphere 4, SRM and View, he joined VMware as an employee last year.
• Q&A and Wrap-Up: Raffle and Interactive Feedback: Bring Your Own Device
  We’ve been using an App to ask the audience so far but if the Wi-Fi lets us down we’ll go old school and ask for show of hands on what you’d like for forthcoming topics.
• vBeers: Join us in a local pub, The Bridge Hotel, for a drink courtesy of our sponsors Nimble Storage

Click here to register for the event

Big thanks to our sponsors Cisco and Nimble Storage

          

Configuring DHCP Relays within RouterOS

   In a lab environment you may want to mimic a live environment as much as possible.  This also includes separating your clients from your servers with the use of VLANs.  I currently have my clients on VLAN 9 and servers on VLAN 8.  My Domain Controller (Also my DHCP Server) currently resides on VLAN 9 so in order for my clients to obtain an IP address from my DHCP server I need to relay the request from VLAN 9 to VLAN 8 as DHCP uses broadcast traffic to obtain it’s IP address which cannot span VLANs.  So, create the required DHCP scopes on your chosen DHCP server:

   Log into your MicroTik router via Winbox and then select IP and then DHCP Relay.  Enter a name for the Relay and then the Interface you want it to listen on and then finally the IP address of the DHCP server you want to forward the request to:

   To test simply connect a client to that VLAN and request an IP address.  If you click on the Status tab you can see how many requests and responses the DHCP Relay has dealt with:

Configure VLANs and Layer 3 Routing within RouterOS

   In my current setup I have a MikroTik RB751G-2HnD running software version 6.0rc12.  This is connected to the Linksys SRW2016 16 port Layer 2 Gigabit switch.  On the Linksys I’ve configured the required VLANs and trunked the port that connects the switch to the router:

   I’ve also trunked the ports that connect to my ESXi hosts so all VLANs can pass through.  Now, to configure the VLANs within the MicroTik router simple connect up via Winbox and select Interfaces and then the VLAN tab.  Create all the VLANs you require and click Apply:

   To add layer 3 functionality so you can route between VLANs select IP and then Addresses and simply add IP addresses to each VLAN:

   If all has been successful you should be able to ping the default gateway for each VLAN from any other VLAN.

Vblock Delivery Experience

   We recently engaged VCE with some requirements to rip and replace our existing aging Dell blade environment and to add capacity for both future growth and a new IP based CCTV project.  First of all I was extremely impressed with VCE from the initial kick off meetings all the way through to delivery and our vArchitect, David Owen, done an awesome job taking our very awkward requirements (Which included the kit needing to be onsite and signed off by 31st March due to budget requirements) and made them happen.  So, what did we end up with?  Our solution comprised of two Vblock 300’s with VNX 7500’s, Avamar and EMC RecoverPoint.  Ten cabinets spread across two sites with a mixture of B and C series blades with varying RAM and CPU’s all running VMware via an ELA.

   We purchased two Vblocks to go into two separate datacenters.  Datacenter A was supposed to be a very simple install with about a thirty meter run from the delivery bay to the final location.  What we ended up having to do is remove one of the internal door frames to ensure all five cabinets could be moved into place.  Below are a few photos taken of the delivery for Datecenter A:














   Datecenter B was a lot more difficult.  The Vblocks had to be delivered down two flights of stairs, across a ticketing concourse and through into a fire escape and then dropped down through a ceiling void into the datacenter all whilst the general public were still utilizing the area.  A custom lift had to be designed to lower the Vblocks and pretty much all hardware had to be removed including the cabinet doors and hinges and there was literally millimetres left to play with.  Below are some images taken of the delivery for datacentre B:

All in all a job well done.

Upgrading vCops 5.6 to 5.7

With the recent release of VMware vCenter Operation Manager 5.7 and having just recently installed version 5.6 I thought I'd upgrade since it was still going through the "collecting data" phase.  As mentioned, I'm currently using version 5.6:

I've downloaded the 5.7 .pak file which can be used to upgrade from 5.0.0, or 5.0.1, or 5.0.2, or 5.0.3, or 5.6.0 to 5.7.0.  To upgrade simple browse the to the UI vApp VM with the following URL and login with your details:

https://UI_vApp_VM_IP Address/admin/

Once logged in browse to the Update tab and browse to the recently downloaded file:

 

Click update to start uploading the file to the server:

Once the file has been uploaded you need to accept the licenses agreement and click OK:

You will be advised that you will be logged out of the admin portal until the upgrade has completed and all services have restarted.  The upgrade should start and if you log back into the admin portal you will see the progress:

Check to ensure all the services have started successfully:

Once the core services have started the appliance will be at version 5.7  To verify this check the status tab in the admin console:

Log into vCenter and check the plugins to ensure they are now using version 5.7:

VMware vExpert 2013 Application is now open

The VMware vExpert 2013 application process is now open.  As per last year there are three ways you can be assessed:

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can now also apply via the Evangelist path.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders. 

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

Good luck everyone

2013 Top VMware & Virtualization blog voting results

Eric Siebert over at vSphere-land / VMware-land .com has compiled the results for the 2013 Top VMware & Virtualization blogs and I'm pleased to announce that came in ranked 196.

Now this is a great achievement for me as I don't really do enough to publicize this blog but I'm glad a few people out there read it and voted for me, Thanks whoever you are.  My aim next year is to rank in under the top 100.  A big thanks go out to Eric for compiling the list and also to TrainSignal for sponsoring it.