Author Archives: alex

NetApp StorageGRID Webscale: Automated Deployment

By | 2018-10-02

A few months after our first NetApp StorageGRID Webscale PoC we came back for another PoC. This time: Virtual Appliances on VMware vSphere. A perfect solution for small environments and if you already have a virtual environment. After modifying some scripts, the deployment was really easy and fast: a 5-Node cluster including Gateway- and Admin-Node in… Read More »

VMware vExpert 2018

By | 2018-08-07

Right after my two weeks long camping tour through Sweden, I noticed a mail from VMware. “You’re in. Welcome to the VMware vExpert Program“. VMware vExpert is a program to recognise the contribution in the VMware community, blogs and social media. In 2018 there are 1741 vExperts from 72 different countries. After my NetApp United… Read More »

ESXi Update 6.5 U2 fails

By | 2018-07-03

While upgrading from VMware ESXi, 6.5.0 to 6.5 Update 2, the update fails with the following error: [root@host:~] esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/echt_raid5/update-from-esxi6.5-6.5_update02.zip   [InstallationError]  Failed updating the bootloader: Execution of command /usr/lib/vmware/bootloader-installer/install-bootloader failed: non-zero code returned  return code: 1  output: ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/lib/libMallocArenaFix.so’ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.  Traceback (most recent call last):… Read More »

NetApp Metrocluster Monitoring

By | 2018-06-06

I’ve written some new Monitoring Checks for NetApp Metrocluster (MCC) which can be used in addition to my normal NetApp cDOT Checks. Both can be found in my GitHub Repository: Metrocluster Aggr Status: Checks, wheather the aggregate mirroring status, disk pool allocation and the disk ownership is OK. Metrocluster State: Checks the following options: local-configuration-state: should… Read More »

VMware | Automatic fix LUN multipath policy to Round-Robin

By | 2018-05-30

A newly (manual) added FC datastore has a default multipath policy of “Most Recently Used (MRU)” or “Fixed” – both means, that there will be only one path used at a time. We wanted all our datastores to use multiple paths, so we switched all our datastores to “Round Robin (RR)”. With about 10 storage… Read More »

VMware | Pre-Provision Distributed Virtual Switch with 2000 VLANs and Network QoS

By | 2018-05-29

For later productive use, we needed about 2000 portgroups in our Distributed Virtual Switch for our customer VMs. We are pre-provisioning our DVS with these portgroups, so there is no need to create the PG, when it is needed. Our network department just needs to configure the VLAN an the hypervisors trunk ports and our… Read More »

vSphere 6.7: Automated consistent VMware vCSA Backup

By | 2018-05-23

In an old post I described how to make an automated and consistent backup of VMware vCenter Server Appliance with vSphere 6.5 and some Linux Bash scripts. With vSphere 6.7, VMware introduced a new feature called “Backup Schedule”: Now you can configure a schedule for the backup (including a cleanup job) – there is no need for… Read More »