I ran into a really interesting problem when trying to deploy the Hytrust OVA on a non-vCenter managed ESXi 6.5 box via the embedded host client. At first I thought for sure it was a software bug, but it turns out it was my lack of reading skills. Hopefully this will keep someone from making the same mistakes I did.

You can read the full details of the errors I was getting and some interesting observations here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/07/17/error-deploying-hytrust-ova-in-the-esxi-6-5-embedded-host-client-and-learning-to-read/.

@msff-amman-itofficer said in A SAMIT Idea...:

@networknerd

I like, especially if it was series that compares with XEN HA and KVM HA in high level overview ofcourse. I found all his vids very easy to watch and learn from, and that is something rare for me especially for I.T videos.

Good point - something covering all the major hypervisors and maybe a little bit about the different types of HA would be helpful too.

I think we need a video talking about what HA actually is, what people seem to think it is different levels of HA (hypervisor, application, etc.), and what vSphere HA is / how it works.

That's a very good post that covers information people don't often think about after deploying vCenter. Additionally, it's something helpful when studying for the VCP-DCV. Thanks for sharing!

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

Could still be weird. But could be benign, too.

Or it could be the NSA.

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@dashrender said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@networknerd said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@networknerd said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

Maybe they had that A record before you had that IP address?

I guess that's possible, but I thought it odd that Jetpack only picked up on this earlier this week. I've had the ip since May. I wish there was a way to see when an A-record was first published, but I don't think you can.

How would JetPack see it? They'd have to be out there scouring DNS records, which is pretty hard to do.

JetPack alerts you if multiple DNS records are pointed at your site because it gets confused about what statistics it needs to collect in conjunction with the hook into Wordpress.com (i.e. when traffic enters from one DNS record verses another DNS record).

Yes, but that doesn't answer the question of how would it even know?

OK I wasn't going to post my question - but considering this ^

I would assume JetPack only knows because someone tried visiting the URL and that DNS server sent them to you. So the DNS server could have bad records for years, but if no one ever visited the URL, your server would never know it. Right?

Right, exactly. Harvesting DNS isn't really a thing and not really possible. You can find www records easily by guessing at this. But this wasn't that, it was an obscure host name. Effectively impossible for JetPack to see unless it was in use and JP was looking at your host header logs.

Ok, now it makes sense. So maybe you were correct about that DNS record being in place before I even got the ip.

Thanks to both of you for helping me understand this better.

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@networknerd said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

Maybe they had that A record before you had that IP address?

I guess that's possible, but I thought it odd that Jetpack only picked up on this earlier this week. I've had the ip since May. I wish there was a way to see when an A-record was first published, but I don't think you can.

How would JetPack see it? They'd have to be out there scouring DNS records, which is pretty hard to do.

JetPack alerts you if multiple DNS records are pointed at your site because it gets confused about what statistics it needs to collect in conjunction with the hook into Wordpress.com (i.e. when traffic enters from one DNS record verses another DNS record).

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

Maybe they had that A record before you had that IP address?

I guess that's possible, but I thought it odd that Jetpack only picked up on this earlier this week. I've had the ip since May. I wish there was a way to see when an A-record was first published, but I don't think you can.

Here's something interesting. A couple of days ago I logged into Wordpress only to have Jetpack get confused about whether there were multiple copies of the site on the public internet (asked me if my DNS records had changed, mentioning the domain epelican.projectstatus.in). At first I thought someone had hacked me and mirrored my content elsewhere, but that was not the case. After some research and ruling out the possibility of a hack, it turns out someone bought a domain in India and pointed an A-record for that domain at the public ip of my site.

Why would someone do this? Has this ever happened to you?

This sounds similar to the VMware weekly community podcast but in video form - http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=19367&cmd=tc.

@Dashrender said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@NetworkNerd said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

f our projects after moving servers will be to clean up permissions and remove the full control.

I used robocopy a year or so ago to do just this. There is an option in robocopy that allows robocopy to run as the backup service to copy the data to the new location. This solve any issues I had with my admin account not having access to files on the volume I was moving.

robocopy /b = backup mode (if you don't have permissions, restart the copy of that file using the backup account)

The backup mode parameter worked like a champ. Thanks again for the help.

@scottalanmiller said in DFW Mango Meetup July 2017:

@NetworkNerd said in DFW Mango Meetup July 2017:

Even though this would not be us talking technology, it would be fun to get a bunch of us together and go to one of those Escape Room places. I'd be curious to see if we could make it out.

I've always wanted to do one of those. I have a friend in New Delhi that does that all of the time.

There are a ton of places in the area. Lots of times there are Groupons for them. I've only done it once, and it was really fun.

Even though this would not be us talking technology, it would be fun to get a bunch of us together and go to one of those Escape Room places. I'd be curious to see if we could make it out.

The Dell PowerConnect N4032 series are quite good in my opinion. They are 10GbE with 40 Gbps stacking cables and are used for a vSAN cluster backbone. They are the first brand of switch I have ever stacked (never had budget to get switches this nice before).

We could do one after MangoCon, and you could talk about highlights from the conference.

Just to get it into the post, we are having a SpiceCorps on July 25 in Euless. Here's the official link to the meeting - https://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/2461.

I finally got around to posting the slide deck on my blog. And I added some corrections to the video: http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/07/05/dfw-mango-meetup-whats-new-in-vsan-6-6/.

I was thinking older version of VMware Workstation / VMware Player, but it appears even older versions want a 64-bit CPU.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I absolutely need vMotion to ensure my systems are up 100% of the time, I have a server infrastructure of 3 or more hosts.

vMotion is live migration + HA? Don't know if it works with SAN or without. but for live migration at least vSAN is required for 100% uptime: share nothing live migration can't work. You can accomplish this other ways:

• KVM has ovirt+gluster
• hyper-v has native starwind
• starwind seems to be available outside windows
• Xen has HA Lizard - I think.

don't know about the setup time and labor, this could be the only discriminant. in Italy vMotion + vSAN is so expensive that I can pay for setup of other solutions and stay in budget.

Maintainance costs is probably another factor. But here others win hands down. RTO and RPO can't be discussed because this is HA.

Can you share some real cases of why you think you have to ditch others for VMWare? just curious. This has been my hypervisors week

The difference is that VMWare has a solution for 100% uptime with "VMware VMotion (which) enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity."

That is HA without the need for a vSAN or other Highly available storage. The hypervisor has this built in.

... isn't vMotion then exactly the same as in Hyper-V 'Move' then? I can move VMs in Hyper-V from one host, to another, without shared storage, and with 0 downtime.

vMotion sounds just like the move option in Hyper-V. Nothing special. If HostA crashes, does vMotion move the VM to another host instantly without any downtime to service and no shared storage? - Now that would be different...

It does.

No it needs shared storage. Either vSAN or iSCSI or NFS. Every hypervisor I've seen can do it with shared storage. Even KVM has built in mechanisms to live migrate between two live hosts with shared storage.

So VMWare has FT now and can do shared nothing with 4 VMs but is really resource heavy. @John-Nicholson set me straight.

Except for the VMs, they are totally shared. It's the same kind of overhead that you get in mainframes or NEC's ridiculous two node piece of crap.

Oh, NEC - that was one weird night at SpiceCorps.

Yeah, super weird. We kept saying "why would we do this garbage when we can do it way better with Vmware?" They had no clue what Vmware was or that they were building joke hardware for another era.

I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I absolutely need vMotion to ensure my systems are up 100% of the time, I have a server infrastructure of 3 or more hosts.

vMotion is live migration + HA? Don't know if it works with SAN or without. but for live migration at least vSAN is required for 100% uptime: share nothing live migration can't work. You can accomplish this other ways:

• KVM has ovirt+gluster
• hyper-v has native starwind
• starwind seems to be available outside windows
• Xen has HA Lizard - I think.

don't know about the setup time and labor, this could be the only discriminant. in Italy vMotion + vSAN is so expensive that I can pay for setup of other solutions and stay in budget.

Maintainance costs is probably another factor. But here others win hands down. RTO and RPO can't be discussed because this is HA.

Can you share some real cases of why you think you have to ditch others for VMWare? just curious. This has been my hypervisors week

The difference is that VMWare has a solution for 100% uptime with "VMware VMotion (which) enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity."

That is HA without the need for a vSAN or other Highly available storage. The hypervisor has this built in.

... isn't vMotion then exactly the same as in Hyper-V 'Move' then? I can move VMs in Hyper-V from one host, to another, without shared storage, and with 0 downtime.

vMotion sounds just like the move option in Hyper-V. Nothing special. If HostA crashes, does vMotion move the VM to another host instantly without any downtime to service and no shared storage? - Now that would be different...

It does.

No it needs shared storage. Either vSAN or iSCSI or NFS. Every hypervisor I've seen can do it with shared storage. Even KVM has built in mechanisms to live migrate between two live hosts with shared storage.

So VMWare has FT now and can do shared nothing with 4 VMs but is really resource heavy. @John-Nicholson set me straight.

Except for the VMs, they are totally shared. It's the same kind of overhead that you get in mainframes or NEC's ridiculous two node piece of crap.

Oh, NEC - that was one weird night at SpiceCorps.