The Synology DS1512 has been a popular choice for many home labs in recent years. I hoped that the company’s raft of recent product updates would reach this model eventually. Well my wish was granted as Synology have announced the DS1513+.
There are a few modifications to note. The one that stands out the most at first glance is the doubling of LAN capability. The DS1513+ boasts no fewer than 4 RJ45 ports. That does seem like quite a lot. It does open up some interesting possibilities though…
Today, VMTurbo have launched their Virtual Health Monitor tool and they are letting it loose on the world for the whopping figure of… wait for it…
$0 – That’s right, free.
The tool is an updated and evolved version of the Community Edition of VMTurbo’s Operations Manager product and comes without restrictions on where and how often you deploy it and what it monitors. Ok, that’s not so clear.
The tool is downloaded as an appliance from VMTurbo’s website in a format optimised for one of the following platforms:
The format of the appliance is the only difference that you should find between the versions though as it’s capable of monitoring all of them at the same time. You just download the format that matches the virtual infrastructure where you want to host the tool.
The features that VMTurbo offer with the tool include:
As I’m waiting for the 428Mb appliance to download over the wet bit of string that is my broadband tonight I can’t speak to the experience of deploying it and what it looks like yet but I hope to have the time to kick the tyres on it tomorrow.
I meant to sit the VCAP5-DCD exam last year after my US project finished and I’d had some time off. For one reason or another it never happened. I managed to book it just after VMworld Europe but then had to cancel again.
The other day, I finally got to sit it (I didn’t get as far as passing the VCAP4-DCD). Hooray, I passed!
Unfortunately I don’t live very near any exam centres that were offering slots for one of VMware’s 4-hour Advanced exams so I had to drive over to Milton Keynes to QA’s training facility there. If you choose to take an exam there and, like me, have to drive there make sure you leave yourself plenty of time as parking wasn’t straightforward. The facilities, the exam station itself was fairly decent. The screen size was bigger than I’ve seen in some other places and the workstation was pretty nippy. I’m tempted to go back there as and when I do my DCA exam.
The exam itself, as I’m sure you’ll read elsewhere, is 3 hours and 45 minutes long and is comprised of a mixture of multiple choice type questions, drag and drop questions and some Visio-like diagramming tasks. What made it quite a challenge was that, unlike with some other exams, you cannot return to a previously answered question, you can’t flag a question for later review. I found that this made me very conscious of time passing. I was torn between making it through all of the questions by submitting some hasty answers – some of which I know I will have got wrong through not ready the question through carefully – and taking my time thus risking leaving some questions unanswered. In the end, I finished with mere seconds to spare so I either judged it right or just got lucky!
I can understand some of the reasoning behind removing candidates’ ability to review answers but I found some of the questions were curiously worded and, with some questions, I wanted to go back and check it almost as soon as I’d moved on. In a way though, I’m glad I couldn’t because I almost certainly wouldn’t have finished. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much because I’ve passed now but I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed the experience. I’m very happy about the result though!
Using vSphere 4 hosts (in this case a legacy un-patched host that was being migrated off and decommissioned), we came across an interesting and ambiguois error – ‘Invalid configuration for device ’0′, plus a note of time, the target object and the vCenter Server.
In this case, I was trying to migrate a powered-off VM to different storage – resulting in the error. I also found that the issue was related to the second disk attached to the VM. Editing the VM showed the size as 0MB, but removing this disk also threw the error in vCenter.
The solution was to follow these steps:
scsi0:1.present = “true”
scsi0:1.fileName = “vmname.vmdk”
Update these entries to the following:
scsi0:1.present = “false”
scsi0:1.fileName = “vmname.vmdk”
Recently, I have been doing lots with vCNS and manual creation / manipulation of vShield Edge devices (posts coming soon). One thing that drive me crazy is a tiny little thing that prompted me to write this quick Little Gem – ‘Edge HA’ sat on my to do list, and gloated at me…..
When creating a manual vShield Edge device in vCNS, there is the usual opportunity to create an pair of appliances for running the pair in High Availability mode. Trouble is, the options for deployment are limited and not very clear. (This might be clear / obvious to some, but weren’t to me!)
When creating an HA pair, in the vShield Manager console editing the Edge device in question under Settings – the HA Configuration gives few options. Essentially, ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’, vNIC, Declared Dead Time and Management IPs. Here’s where my confusion was based. Management IPs. So many questions……!
The option for Management IPs is even outlined. 2 IP entry boxes, and note text: ‘You can specify pair of IPs (in DIDR format with /30 subnet. Management IPs must not overlap with any vnic subnets’.
OK, so I need Management IPs to manually create a HA pair. What /30 address range do I need to specify? Can the IP range share an existing vNIC, or does the Edge device need another interface or uplink. Where do I define the /30 addresses. Do they need their own vLANs? Must I create a whole new private address range specifically for HA heartbeat? Like I said – so many questions. Scour the documentation, Google ‘vShield Edge Management IPs’ produces no helpful results. So – to the LAB!
Turns out, you don’t need Management IPs at all. Simply change the HA Status to ‘Enable’, select a vNIC to support HA heartbeat, and add a second Edge appliance via the green plus symbol (it will prompt for the parameters) to deploy the HA pair! When both report as ‘Deployed’, HA is configured and your Edge device is protected.
Sigh. Like I said. This might seem obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. ‘Edge HA’ is no longer on my to-do list!
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