Planet vSphere-land

While going through and cleaning up my ghettoSkunkworks projects folder before going on PTO, I came across this little post which I must have forgotten to publish. With the latest release of ESXi 5.1, there are now a total of 162 new vsish configuration parameters, with 63 of those being hidden parameters. ***As usual with any hidden configurations, please be careful and use at your own risk as...

Did you know with the release of vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Director 5.1, there are now APIs that allow you to enable/disable Nested Virtualization aka (Virtual Hardware Virtualization) on a Virtual Machine?Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware.In the vSphere 5.1 API, there are two new properties related to Nested Virtualization:nestedHVSupported is a new capability...

As promised, here are slides to my #NotSupported session at VMworld Europe which I continued the theme of home labs with my vGhetto Lab #NotSupported presentation. The idea behind the vGhetto Lab is to easily setup a vSphere home lab without too much effort and most importantly, leveraging as little resources as possible. This is all accomplished with the following:Physical host running ESXi 5....

If you followed my previous two articles Configuring Additional Windows vSphere Web Client 5.1 Servers & Configuring Additional VCSA 5.1 as vSphere Web Client Servers I demonstrated how easy it is to add additional vSphere Web Client Servers to provide additional connection load balancing as well as redundancy in accessing your vSphere 5.1 environment. The next logical step is to actually pl...

I was recently asked whether it was possible to add a non-supported ESXi host into VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator)? The reason for this request is if you are running an ESX(i) build which is not on the list of supported builds, VIN would fail to discover virtual machines on that host. You may see the following error "Access failed. Unsupported ESX version"The latest release of VIN 1.2 su...

I was going through my twitter-feed this morning and came across an interesting article by @herseyc Locked out of the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance. I recommend you give Hersey's article a read as it contains some very useful information about failed login attempts to the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance).There was a question posed at the end of the article on how to increase the number of logi...

Here is a consolidated page on all the articles that I have written about the Nested Virtualizatoin (nested ESXi, Hyper-V, etc) and all the goodies that are "Not Supported".vSphere / vCloud 5.1Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vSphere 5.1  How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1vSpher...

Here is a consolidated page on all the articles I have written about the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). Hopefully this will be useful when looking for anything related to VCSA. VCSA 5.1Automating VCSA 5.1 (vCenter Server Appliance) ConfigurationsHow to Register a vCenter Server 5.0 with Admin Tool on VCSA 5.1 Using SSH Port ForwardingAutomatically Join Multiple VCSA 5.1 using New vCenter SSO (...

The new vCenter SSO (Single Sign-On) in vSphere 5.1 can support multiple Identity Sources (Active Directory, OpenLDAP and Local OS) and these configurations can all be managed by using the vSphere Web Client. Here are some additional documentation as well as a video on how to managing Identity Sources using the vSphere Web Client.However, if you wish to manage the Identity Sources through the co...

Something you might not have noticed, is the fact that you can not change or modify the guestOS type after a virtual machine has been created in the new vSphere Web Client, this option is just grayed out.Though this is a change in behavior compared to the old vSphere C# Client, I actually took this as an opportunity to try out one of the most interesting and unrealized feature in the vSphere 5.1...

I noticed there were a few folks having some difficulties enabling Nested ESXi (VHV Virtual Hardware Virtualization) in the latest release of ESXi 5.1 and I thought I share some additional info and tips on troubleshooting your setup in case you are running into similar problems. *** DISCLAIMER **** This is not officially supported by VMware, do not bother asking if it is supported or calling int...

VMware Labs just released a really cool new Fling called VIB Author which is a tool that allows you to easily create custom VIBs for your ESXi 5.x hosts. If you have tried to create custom ESXi firewall rules or add custom scripts to your ESXi host, you may have noticed they are not persisted after a system reboot and you had to play all sorts of games to get the files to persist. The VIB Author...

Did you know in vSphere 5.1, the new vSphere Web Client now provides a lossless OVF export feature for virtual machines? Previous to this, when you exported a virtual machine only the basic configurations were captured to ensure the virtual machine could be re-imported into another environment that supports OVF. The virtual machine's "virtual hardware personality" such as the BIOS UUID, MAC addr...

I was recently made aware of an issue with my ghettoVCB script that after upgrading to ESXi 5.1, the ability to clone (or in this case backup) using the 2gbsparse disk format with vmkfstools was no longer working. The error that users were seeing was "The system cannot find the file specified." and I also confirmed this behavior by manually creating a VMDK and then trying to clone using the 2gbs...

Have you checked out the latest release of vCenter Orchestrator 5.1? If not, you should really consider taking a look as there are number of significant enhancements in this release. Deploying the vCO 5.1 virtual appliance is a quick and easy way of getting started and that is what I used to test drive the new vCO 5.1. One thing I noticed after deploying the appliance is that vCO now requires a ...

In my previous article, I showed you how to configure additional vSphere Web Client 5.1 Servers for a Windows environment. For those interested in using the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) instead to configure additional vSphere Web Client Servers, here is the process.Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Please test this in a developmen...

I thought I share this quick tidbit about the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) default password for the vCenter SSO Administrator account as I was just asked about it today and this was something I had research just earlier in the week. In the Windows version of vCenter SSO installation, users are prompted during the install to select a password for this account, you might have seen it show up as...

Did you know in vSphere 5.1, you can now configure multiple vSphere Web Client servers to multiple vCenter 5.1 Servers and get a single view of your entire infrastructure as well as provide redundancy to the vSphere Web Client? This is all made possible with the new vCenter SSO (Single Sign-On) and Lookup Service feature.When you first install vCenter Server, you can install the vSphere Web Clie...

I recently came across an interesting article by Andreas Peetz which shows you how to patch an ESXi host using an image profile that is directly available on VMware's online depot within the ESXi shell. I knew that VMware had online depots for use with VUM and Auto Deploy but I was not aware of this particular method, especially directly from the host. Disclaimer: This method assumes you can ins...

There is not a whole lot of changes for kickstart configurations between ESXi 5.1 and ESXi 5.0, majority of the tips and tricks noted in the ESXi 5.0 kickstart guide are still relevant for ESXi 5.1. Below are a few new tips and tricks (some old) as well as a complete working ESXi 5.1 kickstart example that can be used as a reference.Tip #1There are 82 new ESXCLI commands, number of which are new...

IPv6 for the VMkernel interface is now automatically enabled by default for the latest release of ESXi 5.1 and you may have also noticed the additional IP Address in DCUI after the host boots up.IPv6 support has been around for awhile now and you can enable IPv6 by using the old vSphere C# Client or the new vSphere Web Client. If you enable or disable IPv6, you will need to perform a system rebo...

Have you ever had to troubleshoot something in vCloud Director such as looking into a particular vApp and then realizing you needed to jump over to the vSphere environment to continue troubleshooting? This meant you had to perform a separate login to your vSphere environment and most likely using a different set of credentials and then find the set of Virtual Machines that made up that vCloud Di...

If you are still trying to catch up with all the awesomeness that has been shared, blogged, tweeted, etc. about in the last 24hrs with the announcement of the new vCloud Suite 5.1 release, here is one additional tidbit to add to that list which you might not have heard about it. With the release of ESXi 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now officially supported!I came across this little tidbit from some...

I noticed something interesting while extracting the contents of ESXi 5.1 ISO for some kickstart configurations ....Do you see it? It's a VMXNET3 driver for the VMkernel! I also confirmed by running the following ESXCLI command querying for the VMkernel module "vmxnet3":~ # esxcli system module get -m vmxnet3   Module: vmxnet3   Module File: /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmxnet3&nbs...

Just like you could in the old vSphere C# Client, users can also configure a session timeout for the new vSphere Web Client in the latest release of vSphere 5.1. This not only ensures that idle sessions automatically disconnect after a certain period of time but also helps reduce the resources consumed on the vCenter Server as each session allocates a certain amount of resources. To configure th...