The upgrade to VSAN 6.2 did not go as smoothly as I wished. It was possible to do but required me to rebuild not only VSAN but my cluster as a whole as a rolling upgrade did not work as expected. Perhaps this is just the way I have my VSAN configured.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: VCSA Helper VM
In my environment I use VCSA as it is generally far easier to manage. However, to do so, you still need either a single or multiple Microsft Windows helper VMs. The VMs run packages like SRM, vSphere Update Manager, HPE OneView, and other tools that integrate with VMware vCenter. I recently wanted to do some automation based on a few PowerCLI scripts and my version of PowerCLI was out of date. In order to bring it up to date, I either needed to reconfigure my W2K8R2 helper VM or create a new helper VM based on W2K12R2. I chose the later as it was time to upgrade anyways.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: Pre-Upgrade Crash
My last 6.0 patch upgrade had an interesting phenomenon. Staging of three of the patches worked without a hitch. Before I could install the next patch, however, I had to cold-reboot the nodes. A soft reboot caused a red message to the console complaining about a module that would not load: a module I did not recognize, and now cannot remember. However, when this happened I did a cold reboot, and everything looks like it worked.
vSphere Upgrade Saga: iSCSI Woes
My infrastructure recently underwent a catastrophic failure from which recovery was more tedious than difficult. An iSCSI server running from a KVM server using Open vSwitch decided to go south. Why? I am still trying to figure that out. The long and short of it is that Open vSwitch running within a CentOS 7 KVM has a pretty major performance glitch. I hope to fix that soon. So, what happened?
Upgrading Polycom Soundpoint IP 550 Phones
I have recently been trying to tie my Polycom SoundPoint IP 550 phones to a FortiVoice-VM (FVM) Voice over IP (VoIP) system. This is an attempt to upgrade from our TalkSwitch PSTN to VoIP gateway system. Our goal is to move everything we can into our virtual environment. Currently, our phone system is the last system to migrate into our virtual environment. However, it is just not as easy as expected. Continue reading “Upgrading Polycom Soundpoint IP 550 Phones”
PageSpeed and Twenty Fourteen Theme
Google PageSpeed is a required tool for the modern website. If your PageSpeed scores are too low, Google ranks you lower. If your site performs badly, Google ranks you lower. If you do not use SSL, Google ranks you lower. So, a good Google PageSpeed score is crucial but not easy to achieve out of the box with the WordPress Twenty Fourteen theme. Actually, its out-of-the-box score for mobile is around sixty and for desktop around seventy. These scores are not bad, but they are not very good, either. Average ranks you lower. Continue reading “PageSpeed and Twenty Fourteen Theme”