vSphere Central - a one-stop shop for original and curated technical VMware content

This week I'm prepping various Fast Track VMware courses, this involves a lot of reading and watching of sessions, videos, etc.

I do like it, when content is easy to locate, this week, I've been using the following resource.

VMware vSphere Central

Currently the site is  broken down into the following sections.

• vCenter Server
• Security
• ESXi host and Virtual Machine
• Resource Management and Availability
• Operations Management
• Developer and Automation Interfaces

From my point of view, lots of things to pass on to anybody that's interested

What is vSAN? - Lightboard from VMware

This week we've been looking at vSAN and mentioning the many advantages of the product.

VMware have produced a light board session explaining the vSAN product.

To summarise vSAN takes local storage on your ESXi hosts and presents this as Shared Storage.

The session is presented by Elver Sena Sosa and is less then ten minutes long.

Enjoy.

VMware vSphere 6.5 Upgrade and Troubleshooting webcast

Are you upgrading to vSphere 6.5? Then why not register for the following webcast from VMware.

Title: Session 3: vSphere 6.5 Install and Upgrade Troubleshooting - (EMEA Session)
Date: Thursday, November 16, 2017
Time: 12:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Duration: 1 hour
Presenter: Ali Ahmad
Senior Technical Training Specialist
VMware

 "In this final session of our “Upgrading to vSphere 6.5” webcast series we will provide an overview of the vCenter Server 6.5 on Windows install and upgrade workflow to enable you to plan your vCenter install and upgrade. We will also discuss troubleshooting approaches which will help you identify, resolve, and avoid issues during an Install and Upgrade."

To register, visit the VMware webcast site

Enjoy

Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere - Best Practice Guide

This week I'm delivering a Microsoft course which covers SQL as the database back-end, the delegates this week all use SQL, but they have virtualised by using VMware vSphere.

With the above in mind I have included a link to the:

Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere - Best Practice Guide

The guide covers all of the relevant information required to best utilise Microsoft SQL Server on the VMware vSphere server, and covers CPU, memory, and networking best practices over 53 pages.

Hope it is of some use.

VMware Troubleshooting workshop

As a VMware VCI I spend a lot of time talking about VMware products, but on top of that I also spend a lot of time using, maintaining and managing VMware products.

One of the topics that is always mentioned on a VMware course is troubleshooting, one of the things that I can state as an IT veteran of over 30 years is this, “We can’t teach someone to become a trouble-shooter, we can only train people on the tools and when it’s appropriate to use them.”

The VMware vSphere 6.5: Install, Configure, and Manage course, does cover some basic troubleshooting, however VMware Education provide much more in the case of actual troubleshooting vSphere.

As an employee of a VMware Authorised Training Centre, I have to mention that we have a course/workshop that can help provide the tools to troubleshoot common issues within the VMware vSphere 6.5 product, and that course is titled:

VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting Workshop [V6.5]

This course covers the following topics:

• Use vSphere Web Client, the command-line interface, and logs to diagnose and resolve problems in the vSphere environment. 
• Introduce troubleshooting principles and procedures. 
• Troubleshoot networking problems and recover from these problems. 
• Analyse storage failure scenarios and resolve the problems. 
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster failure scenarios and analyse possible causes. 
• Diagnose common VMware vSphere® High Availability problems and provide solutions. Troubleshoot problems related to virtual machine migration (VMware vSphere® vMotion®) and improve resource use (VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™). 
• Troubleshoot VMware vCenter Server® problems Identify VMware ESXi™ host problems, analyse failure scenarios, and correct them. 
• Troubleshoot faulty virtual machines, including installation problems, snapshot problems, connection problems, and more. 

The course/workshop lasts for 5 days, and is very lab intensive.

The course can also help prepare towards, not only your journey to the VCP6.5-DCV, but then further onto the VCIX6-DCV qualification.

Some useful resources for troubleshooting can be found below at the following links.

VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting Workshop [V6.5] course outline 

The following links take you to a webcast hosted by VMware's Feidlim O'Leary

vSphere 6.5 Troubleshooting Webcast Q&A Transcript
VMware vSphere 6.5 Top Issues and Troubleshooting - (AMER Session)