VCDX #91

I learned yesterday am that my defense was successful. What a long journey, and I passed everything the first time, I can only imagine what others have gone through. I am thrilled to join such an elite community of VMware professionals.

VCDX thoughts

I am right in the middle of my wait for VCDX results, so I thought I'd share some thoughts before I know if I pass or not
1) The questions were fair, that doesn't mean I knew the answers, just that I probably should/could have.
2) It's alot more fair than any electronic test.
3) Stay calm, don't let them run you down to crazy town, actually that's not true, they got me off balance, I ran down to crazy town all by myself.
4) Be confident, show your thought process, but admit what you don't know, you can't BS these guys.
5) If I don't pass I look forward to doing a better job next time.
6) The wait is just awful, 10 business days will give you ulcers if you let it.

EMC world 2012 day 1 thoughts

Attended some great sessions on vSphere performance, power path optimizations, vcops vnx plugin -integration , view IOPS performance, vf-cache (taking Storage cache into the server)
Good stuff, excited to be at day 2!

Lab Manager ESX 4.1 Host can’t join back into Lab Manager, reporting error “Host is entering maintenance mode”

Recently upon pushing patches to our ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 hosts, I was unable to re-enable 2 of our 23 blades.  We had one of each flavor, ESX and ESXi.  After much frustration I found our KB 1026364, which says:

===================================================

To resolve this issue, restart the Lab Manager VSLA backend service.

To restart the VSLA backend service on Lab Manager:

1. Log in to the Lab Manager server.
2. Go to Start > Run and type service.msc.
3. Right click the VMware vCenter Lab Manager Monitor service.
4. Click Restart.

When you restart the Lab Manager VSLA service , the DVS becomes unavailable. When the service starts again, Lab Manager gets the latest status from the vCenter Server.

After the Lab Manager VSLA service starts again, you can start repairing the ESX hosts or try re-enable host-spanning within Lab Manager.

===================================================

After restarting this service, I was able to repair our Hosts without issue.

Removing an ESX(i) host from a DvS (distributed virtual Switch)

For some reason the UI makes it difficult to find this option.  It’s not hard to find when you remember where to look.  Go into Home/Inventory/Networking, choose your DvS you want to remove the host from, then choose the “Hosts” tab, then click the host you want to remove and choose “Remove from vSphere Distributed Switch…”

VCDX Application

My application was accepted, I get to defend in Toronto!  My paper is based on vSphere 5.0 Technology, but this is a VCDX4 defense, so I have to be ready for questions on either technology.  I’ve already taken VCAP5-DCD beta and will take the VCAP5-DCA beta soon, Not sure what VCDX5 will look like, but hopefully I will pass and meet the pre-requisites for the upgrade immediately!

Windows DNS Zone transfer's not working (non-AD)

My Scenario is this, NS1 (primary zones) is in Colo #1 in Portland, NS2 (secondary zones) is in Colo #2 in Colorado.  I host a variety of zone files, some big, some small for different groups, all internet facing, none of these are AD integrated zones..  I had to re-ip NS2 due to an ISP acquisition.  After changing the IP's and updating the records, 2/3 of the domains work great, but 1/3 are giving 2003 Event ID 6523 "Zone xyz.com failed zone refresh check.  Unable to connect to master DNS server at x.x.x.x to receive zone transfer.  Check that the zone contains correct IP address for the master server or if network failure has occurred.

For the most part the zone files that were working were small, and the ones that were not were larger, however that wasn't always true.  Doing an nslookup from NS2's console to NS1, doing a ls xyz.com was also not working as expected.

I noticed that in the logs outbound from NS2 that UDP DNS requests were working, but TCP DNS requests were failing.  I had the firewall of NS1 opened to both TCP and UDP, and now everything is syncing just fine.

HINT: I also learned using a test address in a DNS zone with the IP of 0.0.0.0 makes Windows DNS think the zone file is invalid, so don't use that as a lazy address for testing.