dcli and orphaned VMs in vCenter Server inventory
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…
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…
Mystery of the broken VM
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…
VM Consolidation – Survival Guide
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…
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…