VMware

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 ↗:...

I had recently come across the need to deploy an OVA file remotely and didn’t want to have to upload the file over VPN to the destination vCenter, the solution is to install OVFTool ↗ on a server that has local access to the vCenter and deploy it using the following syntax: ovftool.exe --acceptAllEulas -ds="[DATASTORE NAME HERE]" --net:"NAME OF OVA NETWORK"="NAME OF PORT GROUP" --prop:[PROPNAME]=[Value] \path\to\appliance.ova vi://vcsa.domain.com/DatacenterName/host/ClusterName The easiest way to get a list of objects you must reference for --net and --prop values is by running (in this example I am testing a vSphere Data Protection 5....

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....

It’s sometimes necessary (say you’ve been working on a VM on your local workstation in either VMWare Fusion, or VMWare Workstation) to move the VM you’ve been playing with to an ESXi instance to either move into development or to have it properly backed up etc. The easiest way I find to do this is create a .ova file from the VM i’ve been working on. First install the VMWare OVATool found here on whatever flavour your OS is (sign in required): https://my....

So you’ve downloaded all the new VMWare 5.5 goodies ↗ and you want to upgrade your vCSA install to v5.5 - this is a little more involved than you may think, however it is very much worth the effort: In vSphere 5.5, the vCenter Server Appliance limitations have been extremely raised when using the embedded database: Previous to vSphere 5.5, the limits were: 5 vSphere Hosts 50 Virtual Machines With vSphere 5....

Introduction Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool vmkfstools, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk. Windows On Windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool SDelete ↗ (replace the [DRIVE:] with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1....