vSAN is a wonderful shared storage option in a vSphere cluster, but it requires an administrator with deep product knowledge and overall awareness to be able to manage it with an understanding of its quirks and gotchas. I’ve worked with several vSAN clusters composed of many nodes for a few years now but sometimes it still surprises me. I’ve recently spent a couple of hours troubleshooting a “General vSAN Error” to figure out why I couldn’t put a host in…
One of the members of the VMware User Community (VMTN) inspired me to build a configuration where two VMs use PVRDMA network adapters to communicate. The goal I wanted to achieve was to establish the communication between VMs without using Host Channel Adapter cards installed in hosts. It’s possible to configure it as stated here, in the VMware vSphere documentation. For virtual machines on the same ESXi hosts or virtual machines using the TCP-based fallback, the HCA is not required….
Sometimes You want to shutdown vCSA or PSC gracefully, but You don’t have an access to GUI through vSphere Client or VAMI. How to do it in CLI? I’m going to show You right now using dcli, because I’m exploring a potential of this tool and I can’t get enough. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user. Run dcli command in an interactive mode. dcli +i Use shutdown API call, to shutdown an appliance, giving…
The orphaned VMs in vCenter inventory is an unusual view in experienced administrator’s Web/vSphere Client window. But in large environments, where many people manage hosts and VMs it will happen sometimes. You do know how to get rid of them using traditional methods described in VMware KB articles and by other well known bloggers, but there’s a quite elegant new method using dcli. This handy tool is available in vCLI package, in 6.5/6.7 vCSA shell and vCenter Server on Windows…
The other way to list MAC addresses of open ports on vSwitches on the ESXi host is based on net-stats tool. Use this one-liner. for VSWITCH in $(vsish -e ls /net/portsets/ | cut -c 1-8); do net-stats -S $VSWITCH | grep \{\”name | sed ‘s/[{,”]//g’ | awk ‘{$9=$10=$11=$12=””; print $0}’; done This is not a final word. 🙂
Sometimes You need to list MAC addresses loged on host’s vSwitches to eliminate VM’s MAC address duplicates. Create a shell script: vi mac_address_list.sh Copy and past the code listed below: #!/bin/sh #vmrale for VSWITCH in `vsish -e ls /net/portsets/ | cut -c 1-8` do echo $VSWITCH for PORT in `vsish -e ls /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports | cut -c 1-8` do CLIENT_NAME=`vsish -e get /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports/$PORT/status | grep clientName | uniq` ADDRESS=`vsish -e get /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports/$PORT/status | grep unicastAdd | uniq` echo -e “\t$PORT\t$CLIENT_NAME\t$ADDRESS” done…
Creating virtual switch through GUI is well described in documentation and pretty intuitive using GUI. However, sometimes it might be useful to know how to do it with CLI or Powershell, thus making the process part of a script to automate initial configuration of ESXi after installation. Here you will find commands which are necessary to create and configure a standard virtual switch using CLI and Powershell. Those examples will describe the process of vSwitch creation for vMotion traffic which involves VMkernel…
vSAN 6.6 it’s 6th generation of the product and there are more than 20+ new features and enhancements in this release, such as: Native encryption for data-at-rest Compliance certifications Resilient management independent of vCenter Degraded Disk Handling v2.0 (DDHv2) Smart repairs and enhanced rebalancing Intelligent rebuilds using partial repairs Certified file service & data protection solutions Stretched clusters with local failure protection Site affinity for stretched clusters 1-click witness change for Stretched Cluster vSAN Management Pack for vRealize Enhanced vSAN…
Recently we had some strange problems with our 6.5 lab vCenter (Windows version with MSSQL Server db), which frequently crashed. After some digging in vpxd logs it seem to be related to vc db permissions: “17-05-28T19:36:53.443+02:00 error vpxd[05420] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] [VdbStatement] SQLError was thrown: “ODBC error: (42000) – [Micrsoft][SQL Server Native Client 11.0][SQL Server]VIEW SERVER STATE permission was denied on object ‘server’, database ‘master’.” is returned when executing SQL statement “SELECT DB_NAME(mf.DATABASE_ID) Db_Name, CASE mf.FILE_ID…