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…
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…
The vCenter Server Appliance deployment experience has been enhanced in the vSphere 6.5 release. Installation workflow is now performed in 2 stages. The first stage deploys an appliance with the basic configuration parameters: IP, hostname, and sizing information including storage, memory, and CPU resources. Stage 2 then completes the configuration by setting up SSO and role-specific settings. Once Stage 1 is complete we can now snapshot the VM and rollback if any mistakes are made in Stage 2. This prevents…
To begin the jurney with PowerCLI we need to start from the installation of PowerCLI itself. The installation can be done on a Windows based system, that could be some kind of an administration server. The installation files can be found on this VMware site. There are a few versions available, they are released asynchronously with vSphere and the version numbers do not exactly correspond to vSphere versions. The most recent version is 6.5 whilst there are other like 6.3,…
Another good news is that You can encrypt the vMotion of any VM, encrypted or not – encrypted VM’s will always use encrypted vMotion : Disabled – do not use encrypted vMotion Opportunistic – use encrypted vMotion if source and destination hosts support it. Required -Allow only encrypted vMotion. Note !!! Mixed cluster and you have a requirement of encrypted vMotion, then setting to “Required” will not let you vMotion to a host that doesn’t support it. (only vSphee ESXi 6.5…
This is the first part of the series describing the different options to install, restore and upgrade vSphere 6.5, especially the vCenter server. In this part we will describe the process of External PSC deployment. 1.The first step is to download the vCSA ISO image and mount it for instance to your desktop. Inside the ISO image go to D:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 and run the installer.exe. 2. Then we choose the Install option, as you can see there are also available such option…
You can observe some random and intermittent loss of connection to ESXi 6.0 host running on Dell servers (both Rack and Blade). It’s caused by a bug with Cisco Discovery Protocol /Link Layer Discovery Protocol. It can be also seen while generating VMware support log bundle because during this process these protocol are also used to include information about the network. What are these protocols for? Both of them perform similar roles in the local area network. They are…