As part of a customer request we were in need to change the swap location to a different datastore, as the current datastore was about to be removed in the near future. This post is meant as a quick note in case someone also despairs changing the datastore for the swap location in VMware vCenter 7.0…
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Recently vCenter 7.0 Update 2 was released to the public, with new features and improvements. For me one highlight was the introduction of the "vSphere Native Key Provider" (NKP): a native KMS (Key Management Server), or now also called "Key Provider". This allows using features like VM-Encryption, vSAN…
That post is more a quick note, in case someone ever needs this. There might be few very specific and rare situations where you might need the unique vCenter-Instance-UUID. In this case, you can get the instanceUuid in following configuration file /etc/vmware-vpx/instance.cfg:
Once there was a DRS-enabled cluster with a mystery: When trying to start a virtual machine, the very generic error Insufficient resources appeared. However further checking all hosts in the cluster reveals that there’re enough resources left to start this specific virtual machine. But still, the VM…
Recently I’ve seen more cases where the Lifecycle Manager in vCenter 7 fails syncing updates and pulling depot metadata. In this case you see an error like: An error occurred while downloading depot metadata from https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/addon-main/vmw-depot-index.xml.. Just…
When attaching any kind of USB devices, the service usbarbitrator claims those devices to allow passing through USB devices into virtual machines. This is (one of) the reason you won’t see USB sticks as "Storage Devices" on your ESXi, therefore not allowing you to create a datastore on it. But at this point you have to make a decision, as you can’t have both: Using a USB device as a storage OR having the ability to passthrough USB devices to VMs Just to be very clear: This is NOT officially supported by VMware. You should not use datastores on USB devices in production. If you decide to go ahead…
There was once… a customer who was concernced about the network-wise failover on the ESXi-level, which was not working as he expected it to. To shed some light on the complete scenario… The configuration is pretty simple: The switch is vSwitch0 As Failover order there are two vmnic adapters configured as active. (Let’s say vmnic0 and vmnic1) Load balancing is Route based on IP hash (Static LAG/etherchannel/trunk set on physical switch) Network failure detection is Link status only Notify switches is Yes. Taking above into consideration: When disabling one of the two active vmnic adapters on ESXi using esxcli network nic down -n vmnicX you would expect a failover to occur – don’t you? The truth is: Not necessarily. Let’s go into detail…
Due to some experiments with NSX-T 3.0 in my lab with ESXi 7.0 hosts I was in need removing the VIB files manually from the host, as the NSX Manager failed doing so. Just to be very clear: This is NOT officially supported by VMware! Do that at your own risk. If unsure, reach out to the support first. Should you ever be in similar situation, here a few takeaways and lessons learned so far:
I’m building customized and optimized Windows 10 images for my VDI, removing unnecessary stuff from the Windows installation (to name a few: unneeded drivers, retail/demo files, Hyper-V components). This reduces the disk and memory footprint. Once the customized Golden Image for the Linked Clones is finally installed in a virtual machine and optimized (with the OS Optimization Fling) accordingly, you need to install the VMware Horizon Agent at some point before rolling it out. All preparations done. So guess what failed after days of optimization and dozens of Windows 10 image customizations? Yep, the VMware Horizon Agent installation…
You might have seen my previous blog post about the VMware Appliance for Folding@Home. This article is about how the local console was made underneath – and actually how simple it is. Usually when powering on a Linux-based operating system, you just get the usual login console after boot. I thought that it would be handy to see what or if something is ongoing without actually logging in – so in other words: Seeing how busy the virtual machine is, and what the Folding@Home software is doing. So I went ahead figuring out a simple, fast and easy way showing both. Ending up with the idea: Using a terminal multiplexer, and showing the classic top and tail -f /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt. That’s how it looks like (when Enable F@H Stats in VM Console was enabled during deployment): This is how it works…