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Considerations about changes in Time Zones in Kazakhstan and how to deal with it in Linux

On the 00:00 1st of March 2024, Kazakhstan changes the clocks to a single time zone UTC +5 for the whole country. It will affect two time zones: Asia/Almaty and Asia/Qostanay, which are in UTC +6 and need to be adjusted.

And the question may arise – what to do?

As this blog is more about Virtualization, one thing to mention: there are not many problems. Most hypervisors work in the UTC +0 time zone, and the time zone should be correct inside the Guest Virtual Machines.

Many people ask: Will the NTP server move my clock back for an hour? The answer is no. NTP servers work in the UTC +0. And on the 1st of March, they won’t move your clock backward.

In this article, we will look briefly at Linux systems and how to change the time.

Connecting Ceph clients. Block devices – RBD

RBD, aka RADOS Block Device, as you might guess from the name, allows you to allocate space from Ceph and present it to clients as block devices (disks).

RBD can often be found in conjunction with virtualization, in Kubernetes, where disks are connected to containers as PV, and also inside the client OS.

In this case, we will look at how to connect block devices with Ceph to a regular Linux host.

Deploying Ceph Reef cluster using cephadm

The last time I had a chance to work with Ceph was the release of Nautilus (14), several years ago.

Since then, some aspects have changed in the procedure for creating and managing the Ceph cluster.

In this article, I plan to refresh my knowledge on deploying Ceph based on Reef release (18) as an example.

What’s new at Nutanix University?

Good news for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) users – two new courses and certification tracks have been announced.

Two free online courses:
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration (NC2A-AWS) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the AWS environment;
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure Administration (NC2A-Azure) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the Microsoft Azure environment.

Both courses include a theoretical part and Hands-on Labs as well.

And there are new certifications – Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration for AWS and Azure.

NCP-CI-AWS 6.7;
NCP-CI-Azure 6.7.

As usual, both exams are in beta state, and you can take them for free. Use discount code NCPCIAWS67BETA for NCP-CI-AWS 6.7 exam and NCPCIAZURE67BETA for NCP-CI-Azure 6.7. This offer is only available to the first 250 participants, and the last day to test is March 10, 2024.

Veeam Hands‑On Labs

You may not know, but last year Veeam launched a set of Hands-On Labs (HOL) to demonstrate the product’s capabilities. One thing I like is that it’s not just a point-and-click Labs, but a whole preconfigured environment.

Example of labs available (and more):

Test drive Veeam Backup and Replication V12;
Test Drive Veeam Recovery Scenarios;
Protect and Enhance your Kubernetes applications with Kasten K10 by Veeam.

You can get access to the HOL as an End user and as a Partner as well.

Notice, that depending on the region the lab set may be different.

After registering to the Lab you will receive an email with instructions on connecting to the environment. It could take a while.

During the test, my overall experience was excellent. The HOLs has clear instructions and a non-lagging environment. So check this out.

Restoring Veeam Backup Server from configuration backup

Veeam configuration backup is an easy solution to back up your VBR server, including configuration, jobs, sessions, and more. If something goes wrong with a backup server, all you need to do is install a new one and restore the configuration from the previously created backup.

In this article, we will look at how to create a configuration backup of the VBR server, and how to restore when needed.

Using SSH key-based authentication and Lockdown mode in Nutanix clusters

Last year, a new check added to the NCC module may require your attention:

“Password-based remote login is enabled on the cluster. It is recommended to use key-based SSH access instead of password-based SSH access for better security.”

Although this check has a severity level of “Info”, if you dig a little bit deeper, you can find, that password-based authentication will be a deprecated authentication method since 2024. And we can only guess when key-based authentication will be not a recommendation, but a requirement.

In this article, we will look at Cluster Lockdown Mode and how to enable key-based access to the cluster.

Protecting vCenter Server using vCenter HA functionality

In some cases, when we need a highly available vCenter Server, we can use vCenter HA functionality. In short – it’s a second copy of your vCenter VM (and a witness node), with configured replication between active vCenter node and passive vCenter node.

If something happens to the active node, the standby node will take over the entire process and it will reduce the overall downtime of the vCenter Server.

Let’s look at how to enable vCenter HA, and what we need to do.

Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 2 – Veeam Backup and Replication

In the previous article, we talked about how to restore vCenter using native backup. In this part, we will talk about how to restore VMware vCenter Server using Veeam Backup and Replication.

Although restoring a VM using Veeam is a simple task, but when we are talking about vCenter Server a few moments should be considered.

Let’s get started.

Quick Tip: How to change the MAC address on a vSphere VM by editing the VMX file

Someone may know that a vSphere 8.0 Update 2 bug prevents you from setting a static MAC address for a VM (KB 95189).

The symptom is simple – you change the MAC address in the VM’s network interface settings, but after you click OK, nothing changes.

As a workaround, there is a solution – do the same using vSphere Host Client (ESXi Web interface). But in my case, this workaround doesn’t help, I’ve received an error:

Failed to reconfigure virtual machine pleasechangemymac. Invalid configuration for device '4'.

If you are in this situation and you need to change a VM MAC address, one good old hack still works – edit the VM’s VMX file.

Next – how to change the MAC address.