Planet vSphere-land

With the release of VMware vCenter Server 5.1 an important new component has been released: the VMware Single Sign-On (SSO) server. It is one of the components of vCenter Server and is a requirement for installation. Through the SSO server a user now gets authenticated and receives a token that authenticates the user with other vCenter components without having to Sign-On again. Some users ran i...

Did you know about VMware HA admission control coupled to VM reservations? To be honest I thought I knew, but recently I was pointed to some details that showed me I was wrong. What I’m talking about is the cluster setting of “HA Admission Control” and how “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity” and “Host failures the cluster tolerates” are related to...

Been fighting some problems with VMware Auto Deploy lately which turned out to be an easy to solve issue. I installed the first host in the cluster, which would NOT be deployed with Auto Deploy but had a local hard disk in it. Configured it the way I like it, set all the logging and network coredump location to be the vCenter host and then created a host profile. The network configuration consis...

Past two months I’ve received three calls from customers who’s vCenter suddenly stopped working because their SQL database had stopped because the logs had filled up. Turns out few people regularly check the status of their SQL database. VMware has written some very good KB articles on what to do when your SQL DB fills up and stops. So this blog post is only a wake-up call for you to...

Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a vSphere Standard license, you might run into an issue with DRS whe...

Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a vSphere Standard license, you might run into an issue with DRS whe...

Today, when performing a VMware Health Check, I came across a strange issue with a customer of mine. Well, issue is maybe a big word, but I discovered the VMware Tools version some of the VMs had running, were newer than the VMware Tools version from a newly installed VM. To make sure I double checked by removing the VMware Tools and reinstalling them, again the VMware Tools version was less tha...

When visiting customers I noticed that the VMware admin often doesn’t really know how much free space is left on the datastores and wether action is needed to free up space or get extra capacity. When I show them the datastore overview in the VI Client that shows the warnings and alerts for the datastores, it turns out that they don’t often look at this page because it gives too many...

Ever had it happen in your environment? Committing a snapshot on a VM fails and you can’t get your VM to boot again because there are disks missing. This could happen because when initiating Delete or DeleteAll snapshots, the snapshot details are deleted from Snapshot Manager, then the snapshot files are consolidated and merged to another snapshot file or to the virtual machine parent disk...

Today VMware released their Technical Preview of the VMware View PCoIP client for OSX. We’ve all been waiting for this since the release of VMware View 5 and today I finally got to test it on OSX. Of course I had to install it right away and run a test drive from work to my VMware View 5 lab at home. Even though I have only a small uplink to my ISP, I was able to run a Youtube movie at 480p wi...

When deploying XenDesktop in a VMware environment, you could run into the following error when trying to connect your XenDesktop host to your VMware vCenter environment: “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address”. This is due to the fact that VMware vCenter only allows https connections by default. To make your XenDesktop server use VMware vCenter 5 (or 4.1 a...

In my previous post on VMware vSphere5 Auto deploy I explained how to setup an auto deploy environment. This is great for initial setup and to deploy your hosts, but what when an update is released by VMware? The easiest thing is to just delete the deploy rules and recreate them which is ok for a small environment but not in a large environment. In this post I will show you how to adjust your ex...

When preparing your Virtual Infrastructure environment for vSphere 5 and vCenter 5 you also need to think of all the vCenter applications that are dependent on vCenter. One of  them is vCenter Heartbeat. To be able to run vCenter Heartbeat on vCenter 5 you will need to upgrade vCenter Heartbeat to version 6.4. Normally upgrading vCenter Heartbeat isn’t a big deal but there has been a change f...

Many installed vSphere 5 soon after the official release, starting with vCenter 5 and then reinstalled their ESXi hosts. Of course you need the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client as well to set up your environment, which you install on your Windows desktop or inside a Windows VM. Once you have your configuration up and running and want to perform some basic tasks, it sometimes would be great i...

In response to my blog post on “vSphere 5 – How to run ESXi stateless with vSphere Auto Deploy“, I received a comment from Rob Ellison, who ran into issues when PXE booting through a Cisco ASA firewall. In a second comment he explained how he solved the issue. Turned out there was an issue with the frame size of the gPXE client. Below is his solution to this issue. Should you have...

A great new feature of vSphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3.0 was hip, we would all install ESX on the local harddisk (or SAN disk). With ESX 3.5, the first ESXi version was released but only few were using it. With 4.x ESXi really got a large install base and more and more people were moving to installing ESXi on USB or SD card. Now with vSphere 5 a...

Zerto http://www.Zerto.com/ (Zero RTO) is a startup company that I first heard about when they were presenting at the Techfield Day in Boston. All information was under embargo, which didn’t allow us delegates to publish about Zerto until June 22nd and so I had to wait with this post until now. The presentation done by Chen Burshan – Director Product Management and Gil Levonai – VP Product...

When checking a customers environment, I discovered a strange GUI issue in vCenter regarding CPU shares for a VM. I usually use a PowerShell script to check if the customer has set any limits, reservations or changed the default shares settings. With this customer I received a number of warnings about shares. I received the following output: You can see that according to the PowerShell query, t...

Customer called me to ask how they could easily migrate their existing vCenter to a new vCenter including all distributed vSwitches. They were moving from vCenter 4.0 to vCenter 4.1 and at the same time creating an AD intergrated vCenter and moving from physical to a virtual vCenter. The upgrade path would be a difficult road and they decided to just perform a fresh vCenter install. Since a dvSw...

Today VMware released the long awaited VMware vSphere client for the iPad. Since VMworld 2010 the rumors where that the vSphere client for iPad would be released anytime soon, but unfortunately we had to wait until today before we could play with it. The VMware vSphere client for the iPad is FREE and great for some very basic admin tasks, but to be honest it’s no rocketscience.  The vSphe...

Ran into some stupid issue today. Don’t know why but suddenly I lost the storage of my homelab and all VMs had frozen and eventually crashed. Since my vCenter is running as a VM, it had gone too and I couldn’t manage my hosts anymore. Therefore I wanted to make a direct connection to the host. Now, the hosts had recently be upgraded to 4.1 Update 1, but my vCenter wasn’t. Which...

At the Dutch VMUG, together with my colleague Jos Vanaubel, I presented about how to do cheap disaster recovery using only PowerShell. At the London VMUG I held the same presentation again and promised to upload the scripts to my blog. Well, here it is in PDF format: The scripts can be downloaded by clicking this link -> Cheap Disaster Recovery Scripts Before we can failover to DR site, we...

My latest customer was still running on VMware ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 and asked me to upgrade their environment. Their whole environment was running on NetApp storage and for ESX there is a change in the Storage Array Type Policy (SATP) and the Path Selection Policy (PSP) when moving from ESX 3.5 to 4.1. I started with this blogpost by Nick Triantos: vSphere: Upgrading from non-ALUA to A...