During the installation of a really small vSphere environment, I used the 60 days instand-on license. This allows me to use some fancy vSphere Enterprise Plus feature during the installation. Specifically I use host profiles to configure the ESXi hosts. At the end of the installation process I removed the host profiles and installed the Essentials Plus license. The enviroment consisted of two HP ProLiant DL360 Gen8, a dual-fabric SAN with a HP MSA 2040, two Brocade 300 FC switches, some more stuff and a vSphere Essentials Plus license.
While playing around in my lab, I wanted to enable VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) for a VM. In the absence of physical HW I use a nested enviroment, which is running on a HP ProLiant DL160 G6 (2x Intel Xeon E5520, 32G RAM, a RAID 0 with 4 SATA drives). FT isn’t available in nested enviroments, because HW virtualization features are required. This screenshot was taken from the web client.
During a vSphere 5.0 > 5.5 upgrade I got this message:
The SSL certificate for this product is expired. See Knowledge Base article kb.vmware.com/kb/1009092
The customer hasn’t installed CA-signed certificats, so the expired certificates are the out-of-the-box self-signed certificates. The certificates are valid for two (VirtualCenter 2.5) respectively 10 years (since vCenter 4.x), depending on the Version. The only way to continue the installation is to renew the certificates. After renewing the certificates, you can simply continue the setup due the fact, that the vCenter service is stopped at this point of the setup and it loads the new certificates during startup.
Over the last months I wrote different PowerCLI One-liners who I want to share. Nothing fancy and one or two are ugly. But they worked for me. :)
Changing the multipathing policy for all hosts and datastores in a cluster
Get-Cluster PROD | Get-VMhost | Get-scsiLun -CanonicalName “naa.60030*”| Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy "roundrobin"
Get a list of all VMs in a cluster and the datastore in which the VMs resides
Get-Cluster | Get-VM | select name, @{N="Datastore";E={Get-Datastore -VM $_}} | sort name
