TL;DR: I have passed the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam today. :) I want to thank Fred, Dominik, Frank and Jens-Henrik for kicking my ass. Without you, I would have taken the VCP 6.5 delta exam. Thank you! As often, the whole thing started with a tweet. A tweet about my expiring VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification. https://twitter.com/PTerlisten/status/1012936546406862848 To my surprise, several of my followers recommended to go for the VCAP6-DCV Deployment instead.

When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.

Last week I had an interesting incident at a customer. The customer reported that one of multiple Veeam backup jobs jobs constantly failed. [caption id=“attachment_3734” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] jarmoluk/ pixabay.com/ Creative Commons CC0[/caption] The backup job included two VMs, and the backup of one of these VMs failed with this error: Error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[VMDS-SAS-01] VMDC1/VMDC1_1.vmdk] ( is read-only mode - [true] ) Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters [VC/ESX: [vcenter.

During the replacement of some VMware ESXi hosts at a customer, I discovered a recurrent failure of the vSphere Distributed Switch health checks. A VLAN and MTU mismatch was reported. On the physical side, the ESXi hosts were connected to two HPE 5820 switches, that were configured as an IRF stack. Inside the VMware bubble, the hosts were sharing a vSphere Distributed Switch. [caption id=“attachment_3685” align=“alignnone” width=“400”] cre8tive / pixelio.de[/caption]

A customer of mine got an appliance from a software vendor. The appliance was delivered as ZIP file with a VMDK, a MF, and an OVF file. Unfortunately, the appliance was created with VMware Workstation 6.0 with virtual machine hardware version 6, which is incompatible with VMware ESXi (Virtual machine hardware versions). During deployment, my customer got this error: unsupported hardware family ‘vmx-06’ The OVF file includes a line with the VM hardware version.

Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue. Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution. The environment Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all.

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a customer. Some months back, the customer has decided to kick-off a PoC for a VMware Horizon View based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). He is currently using fat-clients with Windows 8.1, and the new environment should run on Windows 10 Enterprise. Last week, we discussed the idea of using Windows Server 2012 R2 as desktop OS. Horizon View with Windows Server as desktop OS?

TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue. Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention: Advisory: (Revision) VMware - HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article: ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers

Today, I had a very interesting discussion. As part of an ongoing troubleshooting process, console screenshots of virtual machines should be created. The colleagues, who were working on the problem, already found a PowerCLI script that was able to create screenshots using the Managed Object Reference (MoRef). But unfortunately all they got were black screens and/ or login prompts. Latter were the reason why they were unable to run the script unattended.

Last Wednesday, VMware has published a list with the vExperts for 2017. https://twitter.com/vExpert/status/829395756788310017 I’m on this list. I’m on this list for the fourth time, which makes me very happy and proud. I was surprised that I’m on this list. I have written only a few blog posts last year. I sometimes tweet about VMware, and I am active in some forums. The focus of this blog has shifted. Are there too many vExperts?