Planet vSphere-land

That was the call I got today. "All I did was add a VMkernel interface and my host lost connection to vCenter". On went my troubleshooting hat. First the environment (simplified) The physical interfaces on which the VMkernel interfaces reside were trunked with multiple VLANs. In this case VLAN(4) and VLAN(49). vmk0 was used for ESXi management - with a default gateway of x.x.4.254 When the use...

A customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped with a Fusion IO card, the UCS 785GB MLC Fusion-io ioDrive2 to be exact. For this customer I had alre...

A few days ago I blogged about my new idea in this post: “The Doctor is: IN” and I received a lot of positive comments and even my first request for assistance. So… here we go !!! Tonight ( June 7th ) at 19:00 CEST the first session will go live. That is, if Google Hangouts works because last night during my test run there were some issues with Google Hangouts. This first session h...

Many of us in IT read a lot of whitepapers, blogposts, how-to articles and view numerous Podcasts or training video’s to learn all the details about new products or features. Still, I don’t always get some of the details or can’t find the info I need. Meeting people at VMUGs or VMworld gives me the changes to ask for those last missing piece of information. But what if you don&...

Earlier this year I wrote an article about using Google's Authenticator application to provide 2-Factor Authentication for connecting to ESXi using either the ESXi Shell locally or remotely over SSH. I also documented the process for compiling and building your own custom ESXi VIB with the help of two VMware engineers (Hongkun Xi & Jian Ouyang). Though the process was not terribly diffi...

Today I had a network issue in my lab, I still don’t have a clue what the issue was but I did discover something useful. I had 3 different VMkernel’s setup and I wanted to make sure each of the three had network connection to a specific destination address. After going through the esxcli command I bumped in to the following command which I found very helpful: esxcli network diag...

There maybe certain use cases where you need to execute a command or series of commands during the boot up of an ESX(i) host and historically administrators have added commands to the /etc/rc.local which is one of the last scripts to be executed in the boot up process. However, with ESXi 5.1, the location of the file has changed from /etc/rc.local to /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh. VMware also provide...

Phillip Jaenke (@rootwyrm) reviews considerations for building your own own home lab and VMware ESXi servers.  Don’t forget to check the HCL!DIY VMware Hardware and Labs Phillip Jaenke (@rootwyrm) ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag US from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo.

Not so long ago, VMware product releases were staggered.  Major versions of vSphere would launch at or shortly after VMworld in the fall, and all other products such as SRM, View, vCloud Director, etc. would rev on some other random schedule.  This was extremely frustrating for a vEvangelist because we wanted to be on the latest and greatest platform but lack of compatibility with the remainin...

The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of "Grizzly" they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companie...

Expendable news item here only worthy of a Friday post.  For those who may have missed it, VMware has released an update to the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 5.1 appliance formally referred to as Patch 1.  This release is documented in VMware KB 2044135 and the updated appliance bits can be downloaded here.  Log in, choose the VMware vSphere link, then the Drivers & Tools tab. Patch ...

Regardless of what the vSphere host Advanced Setting Disk.MaxLUN has stated as its definition for years, “Maximum number of LUNs per target scanned for” is technically not correct.  In fact, it’s quite misleading. The true definition looks similar stated in English but carries quite a different meaning and it can be found in my SnagIt hack above or within VMware KB 1998 Defin...

Publication Date: March 25, 2013 | ISBN-10: 1118407911 | ISBN-13: 978-1118407912 | Edition: 2 The big splash was officially made yesterday but I’m following up with my announcement a day later to help spread the message to anyone who may have been heads down and missed it.  Forbes Guthrie ( ), Scott Lowe ( ), and Kendrick Coleman ( ) have teamed up to produce VMware vSphere Design 2nd Ed...

In my previous article I demonstrated how to use Google Authenticator to provide two-factor authentication for ESXi using the custom VIB that I had built. In this article, I will show you how to compile Google Authenticator to run on ESXi as well as an additional customizations that can be made to the source code to support multiple users. Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, ...

Here’s a discussion that has somewhat come full circle for me and could prove to be a handy for those with lab or production environments alike. A little over a week ago I was having lunch with a former colleague and naturally a TPS discussion broke out.  We talked about how it worked and how effective it was with small memory pages (4KB in size) as well as large memory pages (2MB in size...

Last year, I came across an interesting open source project called Google Authenticator, which provides two-factor authentication by using both a PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) module and a mobile application for generating one-time passcodes. This project sparked my curiosity and I wanted to see if I could get Google Authenticator to run on ESXi to provide additional security by req...

Last week I received a very interesting question from a fellow blogger asking whether it was possible to "pause" (not suspend) a virtual machine running on ESXi. Today ESXi only supports the suspend operation which saves the current memory state of a virtual machine to disk. With a "pause" operation, the memory state of the virtual machine is not saved to disk, it is still preserved in the physi...

Publication Date: August 30, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0321832213 | ISBN-13: 978-0321832214 | Edition: 1 I’m long overdue on book reviews and I need to start off with an apology to the authors for getting this one out so late.  The title is VMware vSphere 5 Building a Virtual Datacenter by Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier (Foreword by Chad Sakac and Technical Editor Tom Keegan).  This i...

ESXi host configurations can easily be backed up and restored using either the vCLI's vicfg-cfgbackup or PowerCLI's Get-VMHostFirmware cmdlet. These commands along with others that perform "write" operations are only supported when you have a (paid) licensed version of ESXi. If you are using free ESXi, the remote commands are only available for "read-only" operations. For more details, please re...

I recently came across a very useful tidbit after receiving several inquires asking how to configure an Apple Mac Mini to automatically startup after a power failure. This is extremely useful for situations where power is eventually restored and you are not physically around to press the power button. Automatically starting up after a power failure is not a new feature of the Mac Mini and it act...

I talk with a lot of customers including those confined to vSphere, storage, and general datacenter management roles.  The IT footprint size varies quite a bit between discussions as does the level of experience across technologies. However, one particular topic seems to come up at regular intervals when talking vSphere and storage: Thin Provisioning – where exactly is the right place for...

I just discovered a pretty cool free online service called IFTTT (If That Then This) which allows you to easily create what is known as a recipe that is composed of trigger and an action to send a notification. This can be thought of like a vCenter Alarm with a trigger and action, but in IFTTT's case, a trigger and action can be almost anything such as an email, facebook event, twitter, etc.I st...

The motivation for this article was a tweet I noticed from Duncan Epping this morning. Per Duncan's tweet, it looks like he may have accidentally assigned an IP Address to one of his virtual machines which was already being used by an existing ESXi host causing a duplicate IP Address error. We probably have all experienced this once in our lives and it can be quite difficult and frustrating to t...

For a project I had to disable the ESXi firewall on a host permanently. To be honest, it isn’t something I would do normally or would recommend even. It wasn’t listed in “chkconfig”, which kinda makes sense, so I looked at the networking section of esxcli. What an awesome command by the way! Quickly after “tab’ing” through esxcli I figured out how t...

A pre-requisite of installing VMware vCenter Server 5.x is for the Microsoft .NET Framework (3.5). When recently installing VMware vCenter Server v5.1 on a new Microsoft Windows Server 2012 VM in my vSphere lab I had forgotten to install this pre-requisite and was presented with the following information box: “The following feature couldn’t be installed: .NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0...