lenzker – vLenzker

#VMware‘s Center of Advanced Learning (#VMwareCAL): We did it … and it was quite an interesting ride

25. October 201925. October 2019lenzker

Almost two weeks are over and I am back at the SFO airport. I have written about my expectation of VMware’s center of advanced learning and it is about time to wrap things up.

First of all. Congratulations to Yves Sandfort & Jens Hennig and therefore the whole comdivision for being involved in multiple post-cal awards e.g. as a top-scorer on the class besides Mr. triple VCDX Safouh Kharrat & Rachit Srivastava more about that later).

Besides that Yves’ team an our team were awarded with the best final presentation based on a case study and a customer C-level sales pitch simulation.

#VMware‘s Center of Advanced Learning (#VMwareCAL): What is it good for …. and my personal expectations

14. October 201914. October 2019lenzker

A dream comes true. Since I started specializing on VMware products I always wanted to visit its Headquarters in Palo Alto. I have driven through Palo Alto multiple times during personal trips over the last year. Silicon Valley, Stanford, so much great myths surround my head when I think about this place.

And here I am: I am currently traveling to Palo Alto to visit the VMware campus for two weeks. Being part of comdivision, a German VMware Partner holding all 5 master services competencies, Yves Sandfort, Jens Henning and myself were given the chance to attend a special training at The VMware headquarter.

Center of Advanced Learning

VCAP-NV Deployment Exam Preparation: Tips and Tricks

30. May 201930. May 2019lenzker

During VMware Empower 2019 in Lissabon my colleague Jens Henning and myself had the honor to do two breakout sessions about the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Network Virtualization (VCAP-NV) exam.

In this session we covered tips and tricks for the deploy exam. This short post should summarize the content for all those people who weren‘t able to attend. The following information are totally suitable for the VCAP-Deploy exam in all kind of VMware‘s tracks:

Datacenter Virtualization
Network Virtualization
Desktop- and Mobility
Cloud Management & Automation

Lenzker’s Why VMworld 2019 ? 10 Reasons Why You Should Go

27. May 201927. May 2019lenzker

It’s this time of the year again where a lot of us need to decide. Shall I go to this year’s VMworld? From time to time discussions come up with statements like:

“(#VMworld) is not the same any more…..When I was young, real knowledge and content was presented… . I was at #VMworld in the old days before it was cool….Virtualization is legacy, Azure and AWS is the only thing that counts”

Who am I to contradict those statements (even though they are wrong :P). I will try to give you my opinion why #VMworld is still the tech-conference highlight of the year.

If it’s your first time visiting VMware’s event I am going to create a second article called ‘let’s visit #VMworld’ about some personal tips and tricks how to get the maximum out of this years #VMworld

#vRealize Operations and #PowerCLI: better together OR distributed switch health check alert. How to easily identify a wrong configured physical network

17. May 201917. May 2019lenzker

During this week I worked a lot with vRealize Operations (vRops). vRops is a great tool when we need to get easy and quick insight into our environment, especially when the environment is a little bit larger. This post should highlight why the eco system (products and community) around VMware is so great and helps us to chose the right tool for the right purpose.

At a customer’s environment we gathered the following vRops alerts

“The MTU on the Distributed Switch is not allowed by one or more VLANs on the host’

“One or more VLANs are unsupported by the physical switch”

#VMware #Horizon: Error during provisioning: View Composer Fault: ExceptionTruncatedFault

3. May 20193. May 2019lenzker

I am currently working on some datacenter migration and during one of the tests we ran into an issue where the provisioning of linked clones was not working properly.View Composer Fault: ExceptionTruncatedFault

View Composer Fault: ExceptionTruncatedFault

After the replica cloning process, all relevant VM files have been deleted. I had this issue in the past and I remembered that it might have been related to some networking problems.

The official VMware network diagram gives us the answer on this issue.

vSphere Update Manager Troubleshooting: Could not scan ESX / ESXi host OR cannot execute upgrade script

25. April 201925. April 2019lenzker

Even though I was more involved in conceptual doing in the last months I was recently asked for help since a customer was not able to update their environment via vSphere Update Manager.

The following blog post explains how we can work deal with the following event / task error messages:

“Could not scan ESXihostname” or “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

The vSphere Update Manager is nowadays integrated in the vCenter Server Appliance and is pretty suitable for patching and upgrading ESXi hosts. In theory the process is really straight forward.

Optional: Create a baseline that includes all relevant ESXi components (so called vSphere Infrastructure Bundles [VIB]) that you want add to your ESXi hosts (e.g. Create a static baseline for a specific vSphere build)
Attach the baseline to a Cluster or an ESXi host object
Scan the Cluster or ESXi host object against the baseline. In the end we can discover which baseline elements are installed on the ESXi host and which are missing. In case all baseline items exist on the ESXi host the host is declared as comply.
Remediate the baseline. The ESXi host will be placed into the maintenance mode, the components defined in the baselines will be installed on the ESXi host. The host will reboot and the maintenance mode will be disabled. Afterwards the ESXi host should be comply to the baseline.

That is quite easy. Easy enough that this module takes around 1 hour in the vSphere: Install, Configure & Manage class (from time to time I still deliver VMware Trainings -> contact me if you want to join :).