I found myself in the position recently whereby I had two hosts I bought off eBay (as one does for labs), they arrived, I had great plans… But no iDRAC Enterprise :( While the iDRAC Ent cards were on their way to me I couldn’t help but want to install ESXi on these things so they were ready to go (old Dell R610s are seriously good value now). One slight problem....
I have been working with VSAN in the lab recently and had the need to get some deeper stats on the inner operations. I had upgraded the lab to ESXi 6.0 U1 and vCenter 6.0 U1 and for the life of me couldn’t get the RVC console in the VCSA to work per the VMware KB ↗. In particular it just wouldn’t log in with this line, even with the correct password:...
While doing some research for NSX setups I found the urge to delve deeper into the calculations of some of ESXi’s load-balancing and teaming types that are available, below I have outlined the scenarios, calculations (where appropriate) and recommendations when it comes to choosing a NIC load balancing and teaming type. Virtual Port ID Your VMs all have single vNICs, You have multiple physical switches, the pNICs from the servers are striped across them, the switches aren’t stacked/don’t have an awareness of each other/are from different vendors (point here, completely different, no collaboration between equipment - any brownfield environment)....
If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid....
I recently rebuilt my lab and added 2x new ESXi hosts, I re-used my old single host in the process which I upgraded from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 and patched to the same level as the new hosts. Everything was working as expected until it came for the time to enable HA. My old host claimed the master roll and thus the other boxes had to connect to it as slaves, however, these failed with “HA Agent Unreachable” and “Operation Timed Out” errors....
If you’ve just spun up a new vCenter 6.0 appliance, have joined it to the domain and added a new identity source but have found that your integrated windows auth (the handy checkbox you use for SSO) isn’t working with this error: A General System error occurred: Cannot get user info Then it’s because the nsswitch.conf file is missing the lsass parameter, to remedy this: SSH as root to your vCenter server appliance....
Just a quick note today, more of a reference than anything else. I had the requirement recently to convert a load of VMs that had thin VMDKs to thick provisioned, however the client was not licensed for live Storage vMotion. In an effort to minimise downtime I decided the best thing to do was use the “Inflate” option in the datastore for that VMDK - this requires the VM to be powered off....
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 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 ↗....
I recently tried to deploy Cisco VIRL on VMWare Workstation 10 - the install instructions ↗ are for v8 - there are a few differences I noted. It doesn’t account for the host-only network installed by default so increment all vmnets by 1 The labelling for VT-x/EPT has changed, it now lives under Settings -> Hardware -> Processors -> Virtualisation engine -> Preferred mode: You need to explicitly select Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI mode After this entering the sudo kvm-ok command in the VIRL CLI still output KVM acceleration can NOT be used....