Why you should replicate your vCenter Appliance

In the old days of virtualization a vCenter used to be a nice-to-have commodity. But these times are long gone (at least from an IT point of view). In today’s datacenter many services and applications rely heavily on vCenter. Some of the most common use-cases are VDI-environments, cluster balancing mechanisms like DRS or Storage-DRS and even backup software needs vCenter.

The last one is a crucial point. It’s good to have your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backed up regularly and most of you and your customers will likely do so. But think of what would happen if you’d loose your vCenter for like 10 minutes or even an hour.

It’s not just important to have a backup of it – you also need to return to operation fast and minimize your Recovery-Time-Objective (RTO). Continue reading “Why you should replicate your vCenter Appliance”

Generate DataCore Support-Bundle by CLI

How I’ve learned the hard way to collect support bundles on the CLI

It is a standard procedure to generate a support bundle after any changes on your DataCore SANSymphony-Cluster. Usually you’d click the Cluster Object in the Datacore-Console and select “upload support bundle”.  You just enter the customer’s name, an incident ID and select your choice of Mini-, Standard- or Full-Bundle. The collection will be initiated on both hosts simultaneously. Files will be archived as ZIP and (if there’s an internet connection) uploaded to DataCore Support.

Single-Host Collection

Sometimes it might not be possible to collect bundles from both servers or you may not want to trigger a log-collection on both hosts simultaneously. Continue reading “Generate DataCore Support-Bundle by CLI”