Ran into a maximum VLAN problem (8 VLANs) on my lab HP ProCurve 2824 switches. This command can be run to increase the max number of VLANs allowed on the switch (in config mode): max-vlans 256 write memory reload
Particularly useful if you have used DNS for your NFS datastore mounts and have rebooted the host with the only DNS server on it: esxcfg-nas -r
I have come across a number of environments where mystery “snapshot” files exist - they are not seen in snapshot manager, running a consolidation them doesn’t help, creating a snapshot (with memory, or guest OS quiescing) then running “Delete All” doesn’t resolve it, but some applications still think a snapshot is there. To take care of these is quite a manual process after you have followed all the VMware KB advice:...
I’ve been playing with cloud platforms quite a lot recently, and in particular Juju ↗’s way of operations caught my particular attention. It has a very impressive feature set ↗ and makes deploying and linking “canned” apps very simple, whether you are using public, private or hybrid cloud instances. I wanted to set Juju up with minimal fuss to give it a quick spin, obviously deploying OpenStack etc is a little more involved for a simple POC than I would have liked and using AWS/Azure/HP Cloud/MAAS was just way overkill....
It has, over the years always been quite a quandary to get SSO auth working from *nix -> MS AD without a huge amount of fiddling and tinkering, but there is a new auth framework in town by the name of realmd ↗. While tinkering with The Foreman ↗ recently it had dawned on me it would be cool to have it set up such that, after the VM had been automatically provisioned it would allow me to SSH into it using my AD credentials....
I have been recently setting up The Foreman ↗ as a Puppet ↗ management front end to allow me to quickly provision Linux based VMs on my VMware cluster - more on that setup in another article. I had to create a PXE boot environment for The Foreman to fully automate the provisioning of the VMs, I run a Fortigate 100D ↗ in my lab from which DHCP is served, as you may or may not know, the PXE boot options are served from DHCP ↗....
VMWare, as of writing, has a nasty bug that means your backups that run utilising CBT (hint: if you have basically any enterprise backup product worth its salt, it’s got CBT enabled) it loses track of the changed blocks when the VMDK reaches any Power 2 value of 128GB (128, 256, 512, 1024, etc.) which may make your backup unrecoverable. The VMWare bug is in KB: kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2090639 ↗ The remedy for this is to disable and re-enable (reset) CBT on the affected machines, this can be done with the machine powered off or with it turned on by running PowerCLI commands and a snapshot, we will be doing the latter, no one likes downtime ↗:...
Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance ↗: Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 ↗ and has improved in v5.5 - so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because that’s what VMWare wants us to do nowadays…). I don’t have an Enterprise Plus license so no Distributed Switches for me - however, if you do have Distributed Switching licenses you should be able to extrapolate from my Standard Switching how to config yours...
It’s fairly straight forward to update your Horizon Workspace vApp to the latest (this is an out-of-hours update due to downtime): Back up your vApp Ensure all VAs have connectivity to vapp-updates.vmware.com on port 80 Log into your configurator-va CLI with the root password you set up initially Run the following command to check for update: /usr/local/horizon/lib/menu/updatemgr.hzn check It should come back after checking all other appliances in the vApp with something like this:...
Introduction I have been deploying a VDI solution recently based on the fantastic VMWare Horizon Suite ↗, one of the important points of deploying the Horizon View ↗ component of this is making it highly available and accessible from the outside for on-the-road users. The best way I have found to load-balance incoming connections (both internally and externally) is to set up a linux VM and run NginX ↗, which is a reverse caching proxy - it allows us to terminate the SSL connections and load-balance across our backend View Security Servers in a DMZ....