About Ather Beg

Ather is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect and works for Amazon Web Services. His focus is on all things related to cloud, technology, storage, virtualization and whatever comes in between. Being in the industry for over 27 years, Ather has been a vExpert for 10 years running and is also vExpert NSX/HCX/CloudProvider. He has also been an official VMware blogger at VMworld EU and US and is one of the founding members and contributor to Open HomeLab Wiki and co-hosts @OpenTechCast as well. Ather’s natural habitat is tech events like VMworld, Cloud (and other) Field Days, VMUGs etc. and he thrives on meeting like-minded people and having a good old chat about technology. He’s friendly and not dangerous at all so please do interact with him whenever you spot him in such surroundings.
30 09, 2013

How to create shared iSCSI storage for ESXi using StarWind’s iSCSI SAN Software

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00September 30th, 2013|Cloud, ESX, How To, SRM, StarWind, vCenter, VDI, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|3 Comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab.  In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup.  Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]

12 08, 2013

StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN: Shared Storage for my VMware Workstation Powered Lab

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00August 12th, 2013|ESX, Review, StarWind, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|1 Comment

Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions.  One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite.  In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]

29 07, 2013

VMware Update Manager Plugin Error: Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 29th, 2013|ESX, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, VUM|21 Comments

You might see an error, immediately after installation of VUM (VMware Update Manager) and after installing its plugin: There was an error connecting to VMware vSphere Update Manager - [Server Name:443].  Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems. Here is a screenshot for reference: VMware Update Manager - Plugin Error This generally happens [...]

22 07, 2013

How to Install vCenter 5.1 SSO (Single Sign On): Common Pitfalls and Remedies

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 22nd, 2013|Cloud, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|6 Comments

The time has come for me to rebuild my lab after a good few months so I've been trashing and rebuilding all over the place.  While building something, I blog about any issues hit but sometimes, there isn't enough time and you miss a post or two.  This blog post is to correct one of [...]

21 06, 2013

Book Review: VCDX Boot Camp: Preparing for the VCDX Panel Defense (VMware Press)

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 21st, 2013|Book Review, General, How To, VCDX, Virtualization|1 Comment

Today, I am doing a book review of VCDX Boot Camp: Preparing for the VCDX Panel Defense (VMware Press).  This is a book not only for VCDX hopefuls but also for people who want to see what's involved in becoming one.  What could be better than a book written by three VCDXs (who are also [...]

17 06, 2013

My Blog is moving!

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 17th, 2013|General|2 Comments

The time has come for me to leave the safe confines of wordpress.com and go to a hosted installation.  When I started blogging, it was the best option for me and with minimum of fuss.  However, now I need a bit more freedom in what I want to do on the blog and hence the [...]

6 06, 2013

How to Recover Virtual Machines with Corrupt Snapshots

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 6th, 2013|Disaster Recovery, ESX, General, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization|0 Comments

There are times when a virtual machine might start rebooting or shut down completely, due to one or more snapshots for that machine getting corrupt.  Depending on the type of failure, recovery from such a situation is possible and at times, with all data intact.  For example, when a backup solution takes a snapshot as [...]

29 05, 2013

Today, I became a vExpert

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00May 29th, 2013|General, Virtualization|2 Comments

It was announced today and if you are a virtualization enthusiast, it might be old news to you by now.  It's an honour to be part of such a knowledgeable community of people, which I consider to be the best in the computing industry. I have been blogging for a few years now but never [...]

19 03, 2013

VMware Hybrid Cloud: “There was an error running your last operation….”

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00March 19th, 2013|Cloud, How To, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows|0 Comments

One of my colleagues is currently researching cloud services.  Like me, he is also very interested in VMware Hybrid Cloud and created an account as soon as it was made available.  However, despite using supported browsers, he ran into problems trying to delete a virtual machine that he had created earlier.  Every time he tried, [...]

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