Careful preparation is a key element to success. If you restart a storage controller, or even the whole storage, you should be very sure that all ESXi hosts have enough paths to every datstore. Sure, you can use the VMware vSphere C# client or the Web Client to check every host and every datastore. But if you have a large cluster with a dozen datastores and some Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), this can take a looooong time.

Another inconvenience that I noticed during the update process from VMware Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2 was, that the automatic screen resizing stopped working. When I connected to a desktop pool with the VMware Horizon client, I only got the screen resolution of the VM (the resolution that is used when connecting to the VM with the vSphere console)), not 1920x1200 as expected. This issue only occured with PCoIP, not with RDP.

I’m running a small VMware Horizon View environment in my lab. Nothing fancy, but all you need to show what Horizon View can do for you. This environment includes a Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS host. During the update process from Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2, I had to update the View agent on this RDS host. This update installation failed with an “Internal Error 25030”, followed by a rollback. Fortunately I had a snapshot, so I went back to the previous state and tried the update again.

While upgrading a rather old (but very stable) Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 installation to 8.0 Update 3 (with intermediate step to 6.5), I ran into a curious error. Right after the welcome screen, this error message [caption id=“attachment_2489” align=“alignnone” width=“504”] Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0[/caption] appeared. A closer look into the BackupSetup.log (you can find this log in the %temp% dir. Just enter %temp% into the Explorer address bar) resulted in this very interesting log entry:

The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) can act as a remote syslog destition for ESXi hosts. This is very handy for troubleshooting and I really recommend to use this feature. But VMware ESXi hosts can be really chatty and therefore it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the free disk space of the VCSA. Yesterday, a colleague had an interesting support case. A customer reported that his Veeam Backup & Replication jobs failed and that he was unable to login to the vCenter with the vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client.

Last week I got a call from a customer. The customer has tried to deploy new Citrix XenApp servers, and because the VMware template was a bit outdated, he tried to clone a provisioned and running Citrix XenApp VM. During this, the customer applied a guest customization specification to customize the guest OS (IP address, hostname etc). Until this point everything was fine. But after the clone process, the guest customization started, but never finished.

Today, I took my very first VMware beta exam. I took the 2V0-621D exam, known as the VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization Delta Beta Exam, at a local Pearson VUE test center. This exam is a possible migration paths from a valid VCP5-DCV, or any valid solution track VCP, to the VCP6-DCV certification. The benefit of a beta exam is the low price (currently 50 US-$) and a chance to upgrade the associated certification, in this case the VCP6-DCV.

Today, VMware has published the long-awaited patch for the ESXi 6.0 CBT bug. This patch is the result of a problem, which is described in KB2114076 (Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0). All customers that upgraded to ESXi 6.0 or installed ESXi 6.0 were affected. Symptoms of this bug were: Powering on virtual machines fails Expanding the size of a virtual disk fails Taking virtual machine quiesced snapshots fails Error messages like “An error occurred while taking a snapshot: msg.

What a great show by Eric Siebert, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and their special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning! If you missed it, watch the recording! First, I want to thank Eric for his work. If you read tweets like these, you will get a bad conscience. https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/579867795833233408 https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/578746970753269761 This is the seventh year that Eric has organized and conducted the annual Top vBlog contest. He put so much work into this contest and this should be be recognized.

Some days ago a colleague and I implemented a small 3-node VMware vSphere Essentials Plus cluster with a HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c. Costs are always a sore point in SMB environments, so it should not surprise that we used iSCSI in this design. I had some doubt about using iSCSI with a HP 3PAR StoreServ, mostly because of the performance and complexity. IMHO iSCSI is more complex to implement then Fibre Channel (FC).