Tag Archives: network

Random Short Take #64

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Welcome to Random Short take #64. It’s the start of the last month of the year. We’re almost there.

  • Want to read an article that’s both funny and informative? Look no further than this beginner’s guide to subnetting. I did Elizabethan literature at uni, so it was good to get a reminder on Shakespeare’s involvement in IP addressing.
  • Continuing with the amusing articles, Chris Colotti published a video of outtakes from some Cohesity lightboard sessions that had me cracking up. It’s always nice when people don’t take themselves too seriously.
  • On a more serious note, data hoarding is a problem (I know this because I’ve been guilty of it), and this article from Preston outlines some of the reasons why it can be a bad thing for business.
  • Still on data protection, Howard Oakley looks at checking the integrity of Time Machine backups in this post. I’ve probably mentioned this a few times previously, but if you find macOS behaviour baffling at times, Howard likely has an article that can explain why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.
  • Zerto recently announced Zerto In-Cloud for AWS – you read more about that here. Zerto is really starting to put together a comprehensive suite of DR solutions. Worth checking out.
  • Still on press releases, Datadobi has announced new enhancements to DobiMigrate with 5.13. The company also recently validated Google Cloud Storage as an endpoint for its DobiProtect solution.
  • Leaseweb Global is also doing stuff with Google Cloud – you can read more about that here.
  • Finally, this article over at Blocks and Files on what constitutes a startup made for some interesting reading. Some companies truly are Peter Pans at this point, whilst others are holding on to the idea that they’re still in startup mode.

ESXi 4.1 network weirdness – Part 3

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So the only real update we’ve had on this ESXi problem is that it’s a bug. But I can’t give you a KB to reference, because, well, there isn’t one. And we’re not alone in feeling some pain about this, as Erik Zandboer noted on his blog. So I guess at this stage we’ll seriously reconsider if and how we use host profiles in the environment and wait for the new version of ESXi. It’s underwhelming but there you go.

ESXi 4.1 network weirdness – Part 2

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In my previous post I discussed some strange behaviour we’d observed in our PoC lab with ESXi 4.1 and the workarounds I’d used to resolve the immediate issues we had with connectivity. We spoke to our local VMware SE and his opinion was pictures or it didn’t happen (my words, not his). In his defence, we had no logs or evidence that the problem happened. Fortunately, we had the problem occur again while doing some testing with OTV.

We took a video of what happened – I’ll post that in the next week when I’ve had time to edit it to a reasonable size. In the meantime my colleague posted on the forums and also raised an SR with VMware. You can find the initial posts we looked at here and here. You can find the post my colleague put up here.

The response from VMware was the best though …

“Thank you for your Support Request.

As we discussed in the call, this is a known issue with the product ESXi 4.1, ie DCUI shows the IP of vmk0 as Management IP, though vmk0 is not configure for Management traffic.

Vmware product engineering team identified the root cause and fixed the issue in the upcoming major release for ESXi. As of now we don’t have ETA on release for this product.

The details on product releases are available in http://www.vmware.com.

Based on our last communication, it appears that this case is ready to be closed. I will proceed with closing your Support Request today.

Regards,”

I’ll put the video up shortly to demonstrate the symptoms, and hopefully will have the opportunity to follow this up with our TAM this week some time :)