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.
Sometimes you need to reset the ILO Administrator password. Sure, you can reboot the server, press F8 and then reset the Administrator password. If you have installed a HP customized ESXi image, then there is a much better way to reset the password: HPONCFG.
Check the /opt/hp/tools directory. You will find a binary called hponcfg.
~ # ls -l /opt/hp/tools/ total 5432 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5129574 Oct 28 2014 conrep -r--r--r-- 1 root root 108802 Oct 28 2014 conrep.
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.
With the general availability of PernixData FVP 3.1, PernixData released the first version of PernixData Architect.
One of the biggest problems today is, that management tools are often focused on deployment and monitoring of applications or infrastructure. This doesn’t lead to a holistic view over applications and related data center infrastructure. You have to monitor at several points within the application stack and even then, you won’t get a holistic view.
Important note: It seems that vCenter Server Appliance updates revert the changes. Please check the settings after each update!
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.
DataCore describes in their Host Configuration Guide for VMware ESXi some settings that must be adjusted before storage from DataCore SANsymphony-V storage servers will be assigned to the ESXi hosts. Today, for ESXi 5.x and 6.0, you have to add a custom rule and adjust the advanced setting DiskMaxIOSize. For ESX(i) 4 more parameters had to be adjusted. But I will focus on ESXi 5.x and 6.0. You need to adjust these settings for each host that should get storage mapped from a DataCore storage server.
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.
