patrik's playground
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...
In addition to my piler installation guide this now focuses on updating an existing piler setup. Luckily this takes noticeable less time than the installation. If you don’t have piler up and running yet, check out my guide linked before. piler update...
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...
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 to note, the usual disclaimer:...
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...
Want to update piler? Then you can check out my piler update guide. This is my installation guide for mailpiler I have written and optimized in the last days. If there are any questions or ideas, please let me know in the...
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… Configuration The configuration is pretty simple: The switch is vSwitch0...
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...
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...
