Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Born and Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area UC Davis Engineering Alumni 10 years of IT experience at an Energy Company Father of twins Lover of Carne Asada Fries

SPBM/PBM Issues after decommissioning PSC

In a previous post, I discussed potential topologies of vCenters in a SSO domain. In general I think I have gotten burned a lot from having multiple vCenters and PSCs in a single SSO domain, but when things are working it’s pretty nice to have a consolidated view. In my latest issue, I decided to… Read More »

Comparing Performance R5 vs R1 with and without Compression/Dedupe on All-Flash VSAN

I built a small 4-node all-flash VSAN for a specific use at my company. We didn’t need high performance, but we wanted the space efficiencies of dedupe/compression plus erasure encoding (in our R5). Note that FTT=1, I could have tested FTT=2 for R1 but not for R5 so I didn’t bother. Equipment: 4xDL380 Gen9 servers… Read More »

Creating All-Flash Diskgroups on DL380 Gen 9 using PowerCLI

In a previous post, I discussed how the Web Client makes it difficult to create hybrid diskgroups grouped by array controller. I provided a PowerCLI script to automate diskgroup creation for this case. With All-Flash, the same issues around array controller grouping exists. A new issue that I encountered is that the “new-vsandiskgroup” cmdlet that… Read More »

Site Recovery Manger 6.1 addfoldermapping API and matching folders across sites

Update March 22, 2017: Added ” | Where-Object { $_.Type -eq “Folder”}” to primaryfolder.extensiondata.childentity (and the subfolder one) to filter the childentities to just folders. SRM added a feature in which you map folder inventories across vCenters by assuming the folders had the same name and same structure. I already had one method for replicating folder… Read More »

How to connect to SRM 6.1 using powershell and WSDL/SOAP

edit 07-27-2017: Updated the script with username/password variables and also dynamically determine srmserveraddr by checking the primary vcenter extension manager. This will not work if you have multiple SRM servers (ie, shared-site config) I hit some issues finding the addfoldermapping function through the api exposed with connect-srmserver cmdlet, so I decided to use WSDL based… Read More »

Uninstalling Site Recovery Manager 6.X

I had a situation where one of my SRM installs would not start. Support could not figure out the issue but thought that there may be something corrupted in the database. I had been reconfiguring my SRM installs anyways so I decided to uninstall. First off, uninstall and reinstall per http://pubs.vmware.com/srm-61/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/srm-install-config-6-1.pdf does not seem to… Read More »

Category: SRM

Smaller vCenter Log Bundles through dmp file cleanup

After upgrading one of my vCenters to 6.0u1 (and subsequently to 6.0u2), I noticed that the vCenter log bundles progressively grew larger and larger. So large that I could no longer upload them to sftpsite.vmware.com through the browser. I had to upload the logs via FTP (which would often timeout). I asked support if there… Read More »