I hope that you are not reading this blog post while searching for a solution for a failed cluster. If so, feel free to leave a comment if this blog post saved your evening or weekend. :)
Last friday, a change at one of my customers went horribly wrong. I was not onsite, but they contacted me during the night from friday to saturday, because their most important Windows Server Failover Cluster was unable to start after extending a shared VMDK.
Last week I had an interesting incident at a customer. The customer reported that one of multiple Veeam backup jobs jobs constantly failed.
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.domain.tld];Port: 443;Login: [ADAdministrator];VMX Spec: [moref=vm-59];Snapshot mor: [snapshot-20226];Transports: [san];Read Only: [true]] failed because of the following errors: Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters VC/ESX: [vcenter.
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.
Update
On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:
No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.
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.
I wanted to retire my Synology DS414slim, and switch completely to vSAN. Okay, no big deal. Many folks use vSAN in their lab. But I’d like to explain why I moved to vSAN and why this move failed. I think some of my thoughts are also applicable for customer environments.
So far, I used a Synology DS414slim with three Crucial M550 480 GB SSDs (RAID 5) as my main lab storage.
A few days ago, I ran into a very nasty problem. Fortunately, it was in my lab. Some months ago, I replaced the certificates of my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and I’ve chosen to use the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) as a subordinate of my AD-based enterprise CA. The VMCA was used as intermediate CA. The certificates were replaced using the vSphere 6.0 Certificate Manager (/usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager), and I followed the instructions of KB2112016 (Configuring VMware vSphere 6.
I thought, everyone knows it, but I’m always being asked “Where’s the hardware status tab?” after an update from vSphere 5.x to 6. Many customers still use the vSphere Client (C # client), and steer clear of the vSphere Web Client. To be honest: Me too. I often use the C# client, especially if I do mass operations, or for a quick look at something.
This is really nothing new, the answer is clear.
Apparently it’s “how to monitor hardware status” week on vcloudnine.de. Some days ago, I wrote an article about using SNMP for hardware monitoring. You can also use the vSphere Web Client to get the status of the host hardware. A third way is through the vSphere API. I just want to share a short example how to use vSphere API calls and pyVmomi. pyVmomi is the Python SDK for the VMware vSphere API.
In December 2013, VMware made an christmas gift to the community by releasing pyVmomi. pyVmomi is a SDK that allows you to manage VMware ESXi and vCenter using Python and the VMware vSphere API. Nearly 18 months are past since then and pyVmomi has developed over time.
I’ve started to play around with Python, and I’ve written about the reasons in one of my last blog posts (Hey infrastructure guy, you should learn Python!
