Author: John Borhek

John Borhek is the CEO and Lead Solutions Architect at VMsources Group Inc. John has soup-to-nuts experience in Mission Critical Infrastructure, specializing in hyper-convergence and Cloud Computing, engaging with organizations all over the United States and throughout the Americas.

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em

As an IT or Infrastructure Director you are faced with tough choices all the time. Right now, that choice is: Do I keep on-premises Compute Infrastructure or move services to The Cloud? Unfortunately, many IT departments have a long history of problems, ranging from availability to security. Moreover, costs always seem to be on the
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VMware vSphere and Time

I’ve been harping about this for years, but a couple of recent customer situations have emphasized the importance of correct time/NTP configuration for all of your vSphere components. In one situation, incorrect time configuration almost completely broke a Nutanix Storage cluster! There was no problem with Nutanix or VMware, but rather networking challenges prevented the
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Do you actually need CA Certificates?

External “Trusted” CAs  There is a common misconception that security is improved Through installing certificates issued by “trusted” CAs. The truth is that certificates issued by external CAs like Thawte, Verisign and GoDaddy are no more secure than those you create yourself! In fact, by going to an external source in the first place, and
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Setting the coredump partition when using vSAN

I was designing a customer vSAN deployment and I came across the guidelines and formula for calculating the required ESXi Coredump partition size: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147881 Right away, I started working the formula for my customers deployment, when it occurred to me; this is WAY more complicated than it needs to be! VMware actually wants you to take
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Virtual Machine Hardware Version does make a difference

For years, I have dismissed Virtual Machine Hardware version as unimportant. In fact, in this very blog, I may have advocated for leaving VM Hardware Version set at 8, to maintain full compatibility with both the vSphere C# Client and the vSphere Web Client. Unfortunately, thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, things have changed. Updating your
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Invalid Snapshot Configuration

Invalid snapshot configurations happen. Mostly, they occur because of problems with storage arrays during snapshot creation/consolidation, but they can also occur if certain process become interrupted (like replication) mid-snapshot. The more heavily you rely on snapshots, the more likely it is you will come across a problem with snapshots. Specifically if you use a product
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