You might have seen me moaning about BT in a few tweets recently. And anyone in the UK will have probably experienced something similar to me. The issue being that BT own the majority of the infrastructure, so they can afford to have rubbish customer service and basically not look after their customers. But aside from these rants we finally got the connection sorted.

Wi-Fi

Traditionally we have always gone for a Wireless router that connects straight to the phone line to give you the ADSL broadband connection and in turn provides wired and wireless connectivity for the devices within your house, one of the issues I had with this in our last house was the coverage. From one corner of the house to the other I would potentially lose access over Wi-Fi on my phone or even on my laptop. When we got to the new house I wanted to make this better and I didn’t want to go with access points or Wi-Fi extenders. I think the biggest rule to remember here is every wall, carpet, door and other obstacle will weaken the signal, which means that some rooms will get better coverage than others.

What is a Mesh Wi-Fi?

I started looking at the various new mesh systems that were available in the market. But first let’s touch on what the difference is. Basically, extra devices sit in around your house and treat the internet in your house like a relay race: picking up the internet signal and taking it to all corners, including places that were impossible to reach before. By taking the signal from your modem or existing router and distributing it around a series of “nodes” or satellite devices, mesh systems eradicate black spots while also maintaining a much higher level of throughput than a single router can maintain. Another benefit with mesh networks is that they are modular being able to add in these nodes to your network to extend the mesh with no real additional complicated work. The mesh network also is seen as one SSID and handover between the nodes is seamless, well at least from the device that I have chosen.

Amplifi

In the end I narrowed down my choice to the Samsung SmartThings capable mesh system and the Amplifi systems. Samsung was not yet available in the UK even though UK CRN had rated the system quite high. But after exploring the options of getting it shipped to a hotel whilst I was in the US and bringing it back it just was too risky to do that. The benefit here though that I really liked with the Samsung kit was the SmartThings hub integrated into each “node” and with this the go to smart home hub I was looking to incorporate in the new home.

Besides the above I chose the Amplifi gear you can find out more information on this here. The reason I went for these guys was they are pretty cool. The prosumer side of the house for Ubquiti and if you have seen any of that kit you will be blown away, that was also a consideration but far too expensive for what I needed at home.

I am not going to do a review of the install and how easy things are to setup, but the image above is what would normally be referred to as the base station. In my setup I have my off the shelf TP Link router connected to the wall socket and then this is connected to this unit.

You can go two ways with the mesh configuration with Amplifi you can use these mesh points that can be put on the wall and provide that additional mesh point throughout the house, or you can choose multiple base station models and then can also act as a mesh point. In my configuration and because of the layout of the house I chose 3 of the full-blown stations to connect together.

As I have said one of these is situation where the modem router is, this is in the living room on the ground floor, my office is situation on the third storey so I have another station or node here, the reason for this is in my office I have several devices that I would like to hard wire this is not possible with the other type of mesh point. The third station is situated in the garage this is where my home lab lives so this gives us more connectivity options there.

This configuration has been running for the last month and I have had nothing but good experiences, even with a power cut just last week everything came up and was back up and running with no manual input. If I was going to criticise then it would be the lack of monitoring, there is some but nothing special I guess I have been spoilt with what I have seen from ubiquity.

Next in the home series is going to touch on what has been implemented from the smart home point of view, lots of sensors, door bells and cameras to talk about.

Veeam Vanguards

Firstly, probably a week ago we announced the new class of 2018 Veeam Vanguards, I am very lucky with this group as I get to speak to these people every day and help shape this program, we have a great bunch of guys and gals in the program and looking forward to seeing what they bring in 2018. Congrats to all of them people.

I will update with a link to show the successful people for 2018.

I have said on several occasions that the IT community is special, its certainly allowed me to fully progress in my career and also got me out of some sticky situations when stuck in a data centre at 3am and you just need to speak to someone to stop you falling asleep.

Cisco Champion

I was awarded the Cisco Champion 2018 status just before heading out to Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, this is my 4^th status award with Cisco. With most of my interaction being around the data centre space, I really want to get more involved and speaking to those security fellows in 2018 to help me better understand what is happening in their world which will affect mine over the next very compliance focused and data driven year.

vExpert

The one that we were waiting on, came in late last night I was already fast asleep so to wake up to this news was great. As with the Cisco Champion status I have also been in the vExpert club for 4 years and this is really where my conversation in the community really started. The benefits of being in this group is amazing, NFR lab licensing, access to TME and SE resource that have also been awarded vExpert status and the VMware vExpert community and mostly this is down to twitter and the newish slack channel the ability to be speaking or involved in great technical conversations whenever you need is priceless to me. If you are stuck or just need some opinion.

NetApp A Team

It also wouldn’t be right for me not to mention the beloved NetApp A Team, an inaugural member 6 years ago and still going strong. (I think anyway) led by the main champion for the NetApp A Team Mrs Sam Moulton. A great community but also a lot of lifelong friends I have made over the time involved here. I wrote this article last year just before the annual NetApp ETL event. https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/netappateam-the-story-so-far

Now I know that’s not all the community groups that exist out there, there are now quite a few that’s for sure. I just wanted to give a shout out to the people that manage these programs, it’s a tough job especially when you have the scale of people to manage and all the swag and communication tasks. Hats off to those administrators of the programs and thank you for allowing us to have such a thing within our community.

I seem to have become a big user of Slack, which the email side of my life has really calmed down the instant messaging, always on nature of Slack has rocketed I think at last count I had 9 Slack teams including the one that I am using for this notification piece.

We all read blogs, and we all consume information from various sources this can be via RSS to maybe an RSS feeder to centrally capture all articles that have just been published, I use Feedly for my daily catch up for all content out there. And that works well, when I get the chance I check in and work me through the many feeds and read the interesting stuff.

But it was another Application and another thing to remember to look at during the day. I also for work have a similar task where I want and need to be more active within the Veeam forums. Because I live in Slack on the side pretty much all day long, phone, laptop or desktop there is Slack installed. for this example, I am using the Veeam forums to capture the new posts via something called Zapier to this custom made slack team I have created with only me in.

Let’s head over to https://zapier.com/ first we need to create a new account. Once you have created this will create you a free plan tier. I would advise the free plan to begin with get the feel of how the platform works and if it works for you and you require more tasks or zaps then obviously you can pay for the pleasure.

The first step in creating this notification engine to Slack is selecting the elements or Apps that we need for the workflow. You will see in this list thousands of Apps and the different things you can do with them. For this to work I needed to find RSS.

Once you find your RSS App you then define what do you want to do with that App and this is where you have another search and you find Slack.

By pairing these together, you are creating something called a Zap. The following screen shows what the Zap will do.

I imagine that some of the other Apps have more options here but all I want my RSS App to do is capture all new posts, comments etc and then send them to my slack team channel.

Next up is adding the RSS URL that you want to capture from, with the Veeam forums there are internal channels so for this I added an additional auth=http which allows me to authenticate to allow me to get those new posts that are in the hidden internal forums.

Add in those forum credentials

Finally, this will give a summary of what it is going to do and run a test against that.

We then want to select some configuration for the Slack channel, we need to define what team channel this is going to and which channel. Pretty sure there are some channels in my Slack list that wouldn’t want this information so to make sure you select the correct one. Within Slack I created a new slack channel named veeam_forum and this channel will only show forum posts.

I think when you first sign up for Zapier it’s a 30-day trial and unlimited tasks and zaps after which that’s when they want you to pay for things. On the 31^st day or maybe even before as I think I exceeded the opening free tier of tasks with other zaps and integrations I created for Reddit and Twitter.

It’s worth a try though if this is where you spend a lot of time during the day.

Sometimes the simplest things can make your life easier but are also the most overlooked. This is why I wanted to make people aware to this amazing feature in Microsoft Word.

I am completely bought into the mac operating system, performance and applications have made it my default, however this little feature I am going to cover is only available in Windows Microsoft Word. Even with the latest January 2018 major update.

First up let’s find a windows box with Word installed.

I normally use Word to pre create my blogs and then upload, the process is pretty straight forward but having to upload the pictures separately then insert them into the post within WordPress was becoming a bore, especially in say a walkthrough post where you may have a large amount of images.

The first opening of this blog template it will prompt you to register or register later to your blog account. It would be a pretty short post if I chose to register later.

From the dropdown choose your blog provider, for the sake of my walkthrough this will be using WordPress.

Add your blog url and include /xmlpc.php to the end of that address, username and password.

As I mentioned one of the biggest issues I face is that separate upload and insert of images. Again with WordPress they are able to hold your pictures so that was the configuration I chose, however if you had another option for example your own server then this is where that can be configured.

Once you have the configuration, it will first connect and let you know if that is successful and if you want to add another account.

That’s it, at this point we can now go and write out our blog post offline, whilst flying with all pictures included.

In the ribbon at the top you will see Publish when you are ready to upload then hit this button.

Two options here you can either straight publish to blog or publish as a draft, I think after using this for a few weeks my advice would be to use this is as a way of getting your blog to the draft stage. There are some formatting tweaks you will probably want to make up there.

On first select if you didn’t select “Remember Password” then you will need to re authenticate.

This will then authenticate and publish your new blog post to WordPress, it gives you a nice date and timestamp of when that was done. Also to note that if I was now to make additional changes then they would update the same WordPress post you will see it as a new version within the post.

Now to make sure all things are well head over to your WordPress.com login. Also notice that I have no categories assigned, don’t know if this is possible from Word.

And finally select the post and you can see the new post and you can add additional text, formatting, SEO detail and check on other plugins that have been enabled on WordPress.

Not the normal post from me, but hopefully someone can start using this cool feature. The rest of us can hope that Microsoft implements this into the Word version on mac. For me it’s not going to mean me switching to Windows just yet. But there are many options to still have access to Windows.

This Knowledge Base article has been updated so much. https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1001805

But I wanted to share something with you guys that slipped through the net in my home lab. I recently created a new Windows 2016 template for my lab for ease of distribution, normal process and easy process to get one of these created. Once created I started deploying some new boxes around the lab to start the transition away from Windows 2012 R2 and onto the new shiny 2016 boxes.

It wasn’t until a week or so later after all backup jobs had been configured and working that I thought the throughput was looking a little low, in fact very low. But this wasn’t the case on all the VMs. I checked around and the last thing I checked was the network adapters in my nice new shiny 2016 VMs… set to E1000e.

E1000: An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC. A driver for this NIC is not included with all guest operating systems. Typically, Linux versions 2.4.19 and later, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and later, and Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) and later include the E1000 driver.

E1000e: This feature emulates a newer model of Intel Gigabit NIC (number 82574) in the virtual hardware. This is known as the “e1000e” vNIC. e1000e is available only on hardware version 8 (and newer) virtual machines in vSphere 5. It is the default vNIC for Windows 8 and newer (Windows) guest operating systems. For Linux guests, e1000e is not available from the UI (e1000, flexible vmxnet, enhanced vmxnet, and vmxnet3 are available for Linux). Always the default but not the preferred.

VMXNET 3: The VMXNET 3 adapter is the next generation of a paravirtualized NIC designed for performance, and is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2. It offers all the features available in VMXNET 2, and adds several new features like multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. For information about the performance of VMXNET 3, see Performance Evaluation of VMXNET3 Virtual Network Device. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools or open-vm-tools to have a driver for the VMXNET 3 network adapter available. This is always the preferred but not default.

Once I had found my mistake I decided I wonder how many people still have this issue? Comments below, don’t worry the first road to recovery is the admitting you have a problem.

Well if you need to change it then look no further here is some powershell to make it happen.

First you can find all VMs that are not using the VMXNET3 adapters by running this:

Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where-object {$_.Type -ne "Vmxnet3"} | foreach ($_) {Write-Host $_.Parent.Name "("$_.Name") type:" $_.Type}

Apparently RVtools can also tell you this information. I have quite a small home lab so I was able to get by with the little powershell knowledge that I have and a little research.

Now we know the VMs that are suffering, but before we go and get these sorted please make sure you take a backup. You know Veeam have a free product that can make that happen for you – https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

As this process is taking the network adapter from the virtual machine and putting a new one in Windows generally doesn’t keep the configuration and settings so it is advised if you are using static IP addressing in your environment that you take note of all IP address configuration. You can do that by running the below script to capture IP addresses.

Get-VM | Select Name, @{N="IP Address";E={@($_.guest.IPAddress[0])}}

Once you have your roll back plan in the form of a backup it is then time to make some changes.

Then by taking that list you can then perform the following set of commands if the VM is powered off then the first two lines are required if you do need to power down then all the script is then required.

*NOTE that this script will preserve the MAC address of the adapter it will not preserve the IP address within the VMs

get-vm view01 | Get-NetworkAdapter
get-vm view01 | Get-NetworkAdapter | set-networkadapter -type vmxnet3 -confirm:$false
stop-vm -vm view01
get-vm view01 | Get-NetworkAdapter | set-networkadapter -type vmxnet3 -confirm:$false
Start-VM -vm view01

If you are a VMware Orchestrator user then this workflow may also be of interest, over at Jeff Greens site he has detailed the workflow steps to make this an even easier configuration change. https://virtualdatacave.com/2015/09/replace-e1000e-with-vmxnet3-for-windows-server-2012-r2-via-orchestrator/

This isn’t a new problem and I am sure I stumbled across this problem back in 2012 at a customer site or something like that. If I can help one person then it was worth putting all of this together. Any comments please share below.

Hello again and from a new home, over the past few weeks as well as being busy with work I have changed my hosting service for vZilla.co.uk to a new one, I also transitioned away from Weebly and over to the fans favourite WordPress. All in all, it was quite an easy transition and it’s not like any downtime was going to cause me any loss in revenue.

The hardest part was the migration of all my posts, I sat and went through all posts and dwindled that down to 71 in total that were worthy of being copied over. It was a manual task and at the time although manual for 71 posts it was quite easy just a copy and paste, until I took down the site that was originally hosted on iPage.com, text came over fine but all pictures must have just been picture links back to that site. I do have those pictures saved locally but it would be yet another manual copy to send them up to the newly published site. Give me time and I am sure I can get that sorted.

The next part of the puzzle as always was the DNS having to change from the holding address on the WordPress site to the vZilla.co.uk address, I find that making the change and going to bed is always the best way, this way you cannot change too many things and affect that end game result. When I woke up this morning I was greatly surprised that what I had done had in fact worked and we now have a hosted WordPress site. You will also find all historic posts have been re published. (minus the pictures in most cases)

So why did I move away from Weebly, the main reason was it was getting too much from a content creation point of view, yes, the platform is simple and easy to use and probably too simple, my path for content creation for the site is to first create a word document and folder structure locally on my mac, this is the main repository for all completed and draft posts, I also flip between using Word and OneNote for this creation. Once I had the writing complete and I had included all pictures in the word document I would then login to iPage and then proceed to update and build each blog. The formatting was different to the Word document so I would need to manually copy and paste the text and edit to suit the format required, then in between I would need to copy and paste the pictures it just wasn’t a nice straight forward select all and paste. I am led to believe that WordPress from this standpoint absolutely is… we shall see. clearly from the picture gate I mentioned above it wasn’t that simple, but maybe I should have sent the posts to word first before going to WordPress.

The other thing to mention is the Bitly links I use over social media and just general links to my posts. Most of these are working as I have changed some settings on the new site so they do match up, some though are not if you are looking for something specific and the search function doesn’t work then please contact me.

The plan next is to get back on with some content creation I have a few work things getting in the way of that but I am hoping to cover off a few posts in the next few weeks. If you have any questions then please get in touch.

We have finally made it to the penultimate post from my HomeLab series #ProjectTomorrow

I have split this one title into two parts because really this is the fundamental reason why today I even have a home lab.

I have a fully functional demo side of things so I will dive into that and what and where the Veeam components are residing, I also have a test environment which really allows for me to test another instance of Veeam software and this is really there to be spun up and spun down with no real persistence. Obviously the virtualisation piece is key to the flagship products Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE, but then also running virtual storage arrays to be able to test and demo against these around our snapshot and storage integration.

Up first is the Demo side of things.  As I said this is there for the Demo type work I need to take part in on a day to day basis, for this reason this needs to be handled with care. I need this to be running with no problems whenever I need to demo the product features.

Welcome back and today’s post is really talking about one of my favourite features from VMware but also I want to touch on a little how Veeam can use Tags to protect your workloads.  The powerful world of tags and being able to assign this little tag to a virtual machine, datastore or pretty much all objects within the vSphere inventory.

You may decide to tag virtual machines based on OS or possibly in order of importance, the old adage of Gold, Silver, Bronze and paper this coupled with other technologies that can consume this tag profiling can really help automate a lot more within an environment.

It’s also so simple to configure and start creating tags, firstly through the Web Client today (vSphere 6.0) only as I don’t believe you can create tags in the fat c# client. Below you will see where this wizard driven creation can be found. You have the concept of creating the tag category which can be used to tag lots of tags together or just house one tag. You must create at least one category before creating any categories.

Once you have at least one tag category you can then go and start creating your tags, for example lets take backup as a great example and use case for vSphere tags. We might create a category called “Veeam” we then might want to create a tag named Gold, Silver and Bronze, we can then TAG these to our objects, in this case lets say a group of virtual machines for each of those tags. Lets say that all the Gold virtual machines require a level of backup on an hourly basis so these are our business critical systems, we then have our single which only really require a backup on a daily basis and finally those bronze machines, do we really need to back those up… yes but maybe only once a week so they get assigned to the bronze tag.

Another use case might be to differentiate between business units or departments to allow the IT department to provide chargeback or showback on each department usage. There are endless amounts of use cases for tags. I think a major benefit of them though comes in that if VM sprawl is occurring or many different vSphere administrators or users are provisioning lots of different machines but someone else is looking after the data protection piece in a traditional way those newly created virtual machines are sometimes going to slip through the net when it comes to being included in a backup job.

As a massive fan of tags I am using them in the trusty home lab, very simply I am using them from a Veeam point of view to really demonstrate the benefits of having them within a system.  Veeam can take advantage of these tags in several ways and I want to now touch on how.

Veeam Backup & Replication

As mentioned above the use case for profiling virtual machines or vSphere objects is a powerful way of making sure that all virtual machines get captured by a backup job. Veeam started supporing tags way back in v8, my colleague has a post that covers off the features, benefits and configuration – https://www.veeam.com/blog/8-gems-in-veeam-availability-suite-v8-part-4-support-for-vsphere-tags.html

Running through a backup job or replication job you hit the virtual machines tab and this is where within Veeam you can select either via Hosts & Clusters, VMs & Templates, Datastores and finally Tags. Below you will see a screen shot of my environment with my category named “Veeam” and you will then see the associated tags and a brief description of what they need to achieve. Within vSphere these are assigned to my virtual machines already so in our job we just need to select the appropriate one and adhere the configuration to the requirements.

Veeam ONE – Business View

Another thing that Veeam can bring to the table other than the awesome backup and replication of virtual machines associated to vSphere tags but it can also monitor and report against them. Again in Luca’s post linked above this can be seen as a walkthrough.

The Veeam One Business View categories can also be added as tags and categories with the vSphere environment.

These will also self associate with the virtual machines for example the VMs with no backups are associated to all Virtual Machines in the vSphere inventory but then in Business View you can now use the workspace to show you all virtual machines within the estate that are not currently being protected.

PowerShell Script

I also created the following script to really speed the process of creating these specific tags. I have actually used this script for a number of years from when I was implementing solutions as a consultant.

#Connect to VC which is hosted on MSI (MGMT) and then Nested ESXi Hosts are shut down.



Connect-VIServer -server 192.168.2.11 -Protocol https -User Administrator@vzilla.co.uk



New-TagCategory -Name "Expiry Date" -Cardinality "Single" -EntityType "VirtualMachine" -Description "Expiry Date for VM"

New-TagCategory -Name "Veeam" -Description "vSphere Tags for Backup and Replication tasks"

New-Tag -Name "Platinum Backup - 15Mins" -Category "Veeam"

New-Tag –Name “Gold Backup - Hourly” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Silver Backup - Daily” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Bronze Backup - Weekly” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Storage Snapshots Only” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Platinum Replication - 15Mins” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Gold Replication - Hourly” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Silver Replication - Daily” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Bronze Replication - Weekly” –Category “Veeam”

New-Tag –Name “Storage Replication Only” –Category “Veeam”

EDIT – so the above happened and maybe there is a complete post on its own here to reflect on the news I woke up to this morning, but I am not as shocked as I thought I would be. Having spoken throughout my night to a lot of my American friends who seem fine not overjoyed with the prospect but not running for the border of Canada, that might change when they have a nights sleep.

Let’s get back on track, Automation within my home lab. Over the last few years in general and work surroundings I have found myself trying to make my life easier, back when I was installing and provisioning NetApp and VMware environments I would look at ways how I could automate the provisioning of volumes, LUNs and then presenting them to vSphere. Simple scripts just created in NotePad ++ if you have not used this free tool then you should be it adds so much ease for just boringly long tasks.

This post also signifies the 7th post of the #VDM30in30 challenge that I am attempting and I am now at the stage where I have the ideas and titles in my head but its now about putting it down on paper and getting constructive useful posts out on the site for all to consume.

In capturing this information I have used the trustworthy source of Veeam ONE to capture and report on and I have used screen captures from these reports. Where relevant and where I have not yet implemented for example my fourth physical host this will follow suit with all other host configuration.

Host Configuration

Each host is configured in very much the same way, this is not because of DRS or HA as this is not really a use case because of the differences in hardware and lack of shared storage in the most part.

General Information

Management