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Tag: vsphere

Part 1 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

Part 1 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

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…

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Alternative methods to create virtual switch.

Alternative methods to create virtual switch.

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…

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vMotion fails to migrate VMs between ESXi host which have the same configuration

vMotion fails to migrate VMs between ESXi host which have the same configuration

As a rule vMotion requires the same family of CPU among involved servers which ensure the same feature set to be presented in order to succeed. This is obvious statement, if you have for example Intel Xeon V3 and v4 CPU generations in your cluster you need EVC in order to make it work. But recently I have came across and issue that vMotion were failing to migrate VMs between hosts with identical configuration. That were Dells R730 with V3…

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Perennially reservations weird behaviour whilst not configured correctly

Perennially reservations weird behaviour whilst not configured correctly

Whilst using RDM disks in your environment you might notice long (even extremely long) boot time of your ESXi hosts. That’s because ESXi host uses a different technique to determine if Raw Device Mapped (RDM) LUNs are used for MSCS cluster devices, by introducing a configuration flag to mark each device as perennially reserved that is participating in an MSCS cluster. During the start of an ESXi host, the storage mid-layer attempts to discover all devices presented to an ESXi host…

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vCenter Appliance 6.0 U3 email notifications are not sent when multiple email addresses are defined in an alarm action

vCenter Appliance 6.0 U3 email notifications are not sent when multiple email addresses are defined in an alarm action

Recently I tried to configure email notifications on my lab vCenter Server Appliance (6.0u3), but  experience issue:  “Diagnostic-Code: SMTP;550 5.7.60 SMTP; Client does not have permissions to send as this sender” I tried to use solution from kb: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2075153 but apparently, the solution does not work with latest 6.0.x appliance! After some research and digging deeper (header analysis ), it seems that root cause was invalid return path in the email header. To resolve this you need to edit two…

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Esxi Net.ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc Advanced setting

Esxi Net.ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc Advanced setting

During deployment of Cisco proxy appliance, we discovered a problem. According to cisco to resolve this problem “Net.ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc” should be set to “1” on ESX’s. The question is – do you know any negative effects which such change could cause. We believe that there must be a reason why by default this option is set to 0 ? That’s why I decided to figure our what it is used for. After some research I was able to find answer: Setting…

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SAP application on vSphere platform

SAP application on vSphere platform

This is a mini article to start our Q&A set, a set of not easy to find answer real life questions 😉  Recently I received a question-related to advanced settings SAP app on vSphere platform: “One of our customer ask us to set the following option to their virtual system: Misc.GuestLibAllowHostInfo This is according to SAP note: 1606643 where SAP requires reconfigure virtual system default configuration. I can’t find details information, which host data would be exposed to virtual system….

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VMware vSphere tags limit – is it known ?

VMware vSphere tags limit – is it known ?

Recently I received quite interesting question – what is the supported maximum quantity  for tags in vCenter 6.0U2 ? Malignant author of the question is a good friend of mine and VMware administrator in one person. He ssked about tags limit because he want to use them to provide more information about each of its production VM’s – roughly speaking need to create about 20000 tags. I thought ok., give me couple seconds to verify this,  and looked fast in…

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VMware Auto Deploy Configuration in vSphere 6.5

VMware Auto Deploy Configuration in vSphere 6.5

      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…

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Adding a sound card to ESXi hosted VM

Adding a sound card to ESXi hosted 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…

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