Today my colleague (vmware administrator) asked me a small favour – help to perform RCA (root cause analyze) – related to one of production VM that had recently a problem. VM for some reason was migrated (collegue stands that it happened without administrative intervention) to other ESXi host that do not have proper network config for this vm – this caused outage for whole system. I asked about issue time and we went deeper into logs in order to find…
Recenly, I found a strange issue with my Customer’s VDP backup. There is VDP version 6.1.3 and vSphere 6.0 Update 2. The problem is that the backup jobs of a few virtual machines got stuck at 92%. The state was present for more than week at the first try, untill it was manually cancelled. There is a way to check the actual status of backup via CLI. So did I. Unfortunatelly the command mccli activity show –active displayed fallowing information: I went through…
VMware PowerCLI is a powerful tool for daily task for every Admin. The pure console is most commonly used. However, there are a few alternatives to the simple console which could make the use of PowerCLI even more handy. I’ll describe them shortly in the next a few lines. Powershell ISE script editor, which provides a better user experience. It’s divided into two panes. The upper pane is for viewing/editing script files, and the lower pane is for running individual commands…
In my last post about Infinio Accelerator we introduced product and basics about it. Now it is time to go more deep – how this server side cache is working ? Infinio’s cache inserts server RAM (and optionally, flash devices) transparently into the I/O stream. By dynamically populating server-side media with the hottest data, Infinio’s software reduces storage requirements to a small fraction of the workload size. Infinio is built on VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. This enables administrators…
Shared storage performance and characteristics (iops,latency) is crucial for overall vSphere platform performance and users satisfaction. In the advent of ssd and memory cache solutions we have many options to chose in case storage acceleration (local ssd, array side ssd , server side ssd). Lets discuse further server side caching – act of caching data on the server. Data can be cached anywhere and at any point on the server that makes sense. It is common to cache commonly used…
The architecture of auto deploy has changed in vSphere 6.5, one of the main difference is the ImageBuilder build in vCenter and the fact that you can create image profiles through the GUI instead of PowerCLI. That is really good news for those how is not keen on PowerCLI. But let’s go throgh the new configuration process of Auto Deploy. Below I gathered all the necessary steps to configure Auto Deploy in your environment. Enable Auto Deploy…
According to VMware definitione vSphere Auto Deploy can provision hundreds of physical hosts with ESXi software. You can specify the image to deploy and the hosts to provision with the image. Optionally, you can specify host profiles to apply to the hosts, a vCenter Server location (datacenter, folder or cluster), and assign a script bundle for each host. In short that is the tool to automate your ESXi deployment or upgrade. As far as I know in particular on the Polish…
Survival guide for any vm snaphost consolidation problems all in one place : Note! Make sure any backup software is turned off or that all jobs are stopped. A reboot of the backup server is required to clear any potential residual locks. Restart vc service – https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003895 Restart the management agents on the ESXi cluster where problematic vms are working #services.sh restart – https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003490, or manually verify to determine “who” is holding the lock 3. Use vmfstools (-D) command against vm…
VMware announced the VCP Datacenter beta exam updated according to new features in vSphere 6.5. It is expecially valuable for those who need to recertify or who do not have a valid VCP certification. People who already have active VCP6-DCV exam, passing this beta exam will not give any big reward, while even the title is the same. So there won’t be VCP6.5-DCV or so, it’s still VCP6-DCV Certification. Anyway, as others VMware beta exam it costs only 50$, so…
Sound Card in vSphere Virtual Machine is an unsupported configuration. This is feature dedicated to Virtual Machines created in VMware Workstation. However, you can still add HD Audio device to vSphere Virtual Machine by manually editing .vmx file. I have tested it in our lab environment and it works just fine. Below procedure how to do this: 1. Verify storage where VM with no soundcard reside Login with root to the ESXi host where VM reside using SSH. 3. Navigate…