Check seven times – enter once
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.
Continue reading “Deploying Ceph Reef cluster using cephadm” 
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.
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):
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.
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.
Continue reading “Restoring Veeam Backup Server from configuration backup”
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.
Continue reading “Using SSH key-based authentication and Lockdown mode in Nutanix clusters”
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.
Continue reading “Protecting vCenter Server using vCenter HA functionality”
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.
Continue reading “Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 2 – Veeam Backup and Replication”
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.
Continue reading “Quick Tip: How to change the MAC address on a vSphere VM by editing the VMX file”
vCenter server is a critical part of the VMware infrastructure stack, and most components and 3rd-party solutions depend on it. Although downtime of vCenter may not cause a problem with overall infrastructure and will not cause a VMs downtime, it will affect the provision of new resources, management, backups, and so on. So, keeping your vCenter up and running is a priority task in most cases.
In the few articles, we will look at how to backup and restore the vCenter server, if something goes wrong. There are a few strategies for protecting the vCenter server, but all of them depend on the required availability of the service. It can be backup, replication, vCenter HA functionality, or even deploying a new vCenter and connecting hosts manually.
We will look at two options – backup and restore vCenter using the native backup function and backup and restore vCenter using 3rd party backup software.
In this article, we will take a closer look at how to backup vCSA using native backup, available in VAMI.
Continue reading “Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 1 – Native backup”
In this article, we will look at backing up Nutanix AHV virtual machines using VBR 12.1 and Nutanix AHV Plug-In v5.
The main difference between the v4 plugin and v5 is the possibility of creating backup jobs related to Nutanix AHV VMs right in the VBR console. You don’t need to connect to the backup appliance deployed in a Nutanix cluster to create a backup job.
Also, please make sure, that you’re using version 5.1 of the plugin or higher because of the critical bug found in v5.0.
Continue reading “How to backup Nutanix AHV using Veeam Backup and Replication 12.1 and Veeam Plug-In for Nutanix AHV v5”