vSphere

I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer ↗ in my lab recently - it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t exactly a model config when it comes to any of these things: It’s really very cool, syslogging is also built in, if you add it as a syslog target to your hosts (RCA can do this automatically too) it will monitor the syslogs incoming and search the KB database for any matching problems - I actually found that some of my iSCSI paths weren’t coming up after failover due to this!...

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:...

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:...

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...

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....

Recently had a problem were Veeam was giving bother on one VM that had a dedicated datastore, not allowing hot-add virtual appliance mode to work. I originally thought it was a problem with CBT (changed block tracking) so I disabled that, with no luck, as it transpires there were a few (all datastore formatting related) problems: The Veeam proxy’s datastore was formatted in VFMS-3 with a 2MB block size and upgraded to VMFS-5 (retaining its 2MB block size of course - otherwise a reformat would be needed)....

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....

I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts. There are a few caveats here: The VMWare datastore for 2TB+ LUNs must be VMFS-5 as it is now GPT based, not MBR. This can be updated on the fly without shutting down VMs (Configuration -> Storage, Click the Datastore -> “Upgrade to VMFS-5”) Expanding the virtual disks on MD3000i’s can only be done in CLI....