Category: Dell

21. September 2023

Dell XR4000 and VMware vSphere – NextGen Edge Solution

Last year at Dell Technologies World 2022, my mentor Marc Huppert (VCDX 181) and I came across the Dell XR4000 at the Solutions Expo. I mean we have seen it all before, servers, storage and networking but this edge solution from Dell blew us away! CEO Michael Dell said in his keynote that by 2025, more than 50% of IT deployments will happen in the […]

20. September 2023

Dell VxRail Health Check with VxVerify Tool

VxVerify is designed to be used after initial VxRail deployments and before upgrades, to proactively identify issues that could lead to complications or failures. I always recommend checking the cluster with VxVerify before making any further adjustments, such as customising the cluster or upgrading to vSphere/VxRail 8 for example. This tool unpacks so-called minions during execution, which are running on each ESXi in the cluster. […]

19. September 2023

Configuring LACP on Distributed Switches – VMware vSphere 8 & Dell VxRail

With Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support on a vSphere distributed switch, you can connect ESX hosts to physical switches using dynamic link aggregation. Multiple link aggregation groups can be created on a distributed switch to aggregate bandwidth from physical NICs to ESXi hosts connected to LACP port channels. Most of you have probably created a LACP configuration on a distributed switch in various customer […]

12. September 2023

How to RASR Reset a Dell VxRail 8.0 Node

Of course – Dell’s VxRail universe has also arrived in VMware vSphere 8. And of course it still happens that individual nodes have to be RASR’ed. However, the procedure has changed with the 15G server models. In my previous post, I described how we had to perform the RASR process via the embedded SD cards. This is different now, first, pull the correct SOLVE procedure […]

5. September 2023

How to reset Dell VxRail Mystic User Password

It really happens that one or the other customer loses his mystic user password of his VxRail Manager. Especially if you want to check various logs on the appliance and the whole thing should run via SSH, the mystic user is extremely important. This is because root access to the VxRail Manager via SSH is restricted. But what if the mystic password is not available […]

1. September 2023

Dell VxRail Node cluster extension fails “Enabling VMware HA…”

In my session today, I wanted expand a customers vSAN Streched Cluster with more VxRail Nodes. The Loudmouth service worked and so we were able to see and add the new node. However, the process stopped halfway with the following error message: We reviewed various logs, which I listed in another blog post: However, we have not found anything meaningful. If you want to cancel […]

31. August 2023

How to Update a Dell DataDomain Virtual Edition (DDVE) OS

If you want to update your DataDomain Virtual Edition, the whole thing is relatively simple, let’s get started right away. To avoid searching for the right spot at the Dell support page, we go to System under Maintenance on the DDVE: We see that the current OS version according to the system is 7.11, if we click on DELL EMC ONLINE SUPPORT at the bottom, […]

21. August 2023

Lost connectivity to the device naa.61xxxxxx backing the boot filesystem 

Today I noticed that my ESXi 04 displays the following information: Lost connectivity to the device naa.61xxxxxx backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.61xxxxxx. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage. So let us open a SSH session to have a look at the mentioned device by using following command: As we can see, there are some Failed Operations, to get […]

4. July 2023

Missing information for the node hosting Dell VxRail Manager in the input JSON file

A customer called me during a Dell VxRail 4 Node deployment and asked me what he could do about the following error message: *Sorry for the poor quality picture. 🙂 There are various situations where the Loudmouth service (IPv6 multicast) of the Dell VxRail cannot be used, e.g. the switches do not support this feature. In this case, the individual ESXi hosts must be added […]

3. April 2023

Dell PowerProtect – Data Manager & DDVE – the best Data Protection Solution for the vSphere Universe?

I was a all-time Veeam Backup user, the free 10 VM Community Edition is great for Homelabs and (really) small Datacenter or Witness sites. You know how it is, both our customers and ourselves, want to discover new technologies every now and then. Right there, I came across Dell PowerProtect, which is based on the very successful EMC² DataDomain appliance. There will surely be one […]