2017

I’ve just been working through automating the powering on and off of my lab server, which is a single physical server running ESXi 6.5, and nested virtual machines for my lab. I wanted to use the ESXi Autostart feature to start my domain controller and jump box at power on. But I had an issue where one of the two VMs I want to power on would simply not start.

I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.

Back in March, I attended the Melbourne VMUG UserCon. This is the first UserCon I attended, and damn was I impressed! From what I’ve heard via peers, VMUG hasn’t been having the best run lately, world wide. Needless to say, the team behind both the Sydney and the Melbourne events did a fantastic job. This year consisted of a rockstar lineup of speakers not only from VMware, but also from partners and affiliates who presented fantastic breakout sessions during the day.

Runecast Analyser was founded in 2014 and at a high level, is a product to provide proactive analysis for VMware environment. I’ve only recently been introduced to Runecast and I’ve had the chance to download and use it in my lab environment. I was lucky enough to meet Ched and Stanimir recently at the Melbourne VMUG. I thought I would take the opportunity to record a walkthrough of the product for those that may be interested to see what Runecast Analyser is all about.

So last week I received a new lab server that is going to be housed at home. It is a Dell T430 with 128GB ram, which is exactly what I was after as I want to get right back into the lab work, but I didn’t want a heap of gear and network requirements. NestedESXi has worked reasonably well in the past few vSphere releases and there’s not much that can’t be simulated within a nested environment for the purposes of learning or testing.

Quick post. The other day I saw an alert on an ESXi 6.0 host as follows: Agent can’t send heartbeats: No buffer space available The host was responsive and connected to vCenter Server, and the VMs were running OK on the host. I checked the vmkernel / hostd / vpxa logs, and the only mention of this was a one liner in the vmkernel log which repeated the error message above.

[toc] Introduction If you work in the VMware suite of products and haven’t heard of or checked out the VMware Flings website, head on over and check it out! As the website says; “Flings are apps and tools built by our engineers that are intended to be played with and explored.” A lot of products and features that make it into the product start out as being VMware flings. Some recent ones that come to mind are the vCenter Migration Tool (migrate Windows vCenter to the Appliance), HTML5 Web Client, ESXi Embedded Host client … you get the drift.

Early this morning VMware released the results for the VMware vExpert 2017 programme. Before even seeing the post, I woke up to a couple of slack messages with congrats (I’m currently on holiday and also on the Gold Coast, 1 hour behind my normal time zone!). I checked out the official post (link below) and sure enough my name is listed there, along with 1400 odd other people! From what I’ve seen there were around 100 new members in 2017.

Introduction The VMware vCenter Support Assistant is a free plugin made available by VMware in the form of a virtual appliance. After deploying the appliance, it can be registered to vSphere SSO and you can authorise one or more vCenter Servers to Support Assistant. Support Assistant provides the following benefits: Reactive support. You can use the Support Assistant plugin in the vSphere Web Client to easily create new service requests (SRs), as it is essentially a front end to the MyVMware portal.

Introduction Nimble Storage arrays are one of my favourite SAN arrays to work with at the moment. However, until Nimble OS3 which was made GA on the 31st of August, 2016, there was no support for the XCOPY VAAI primitive. This meant that when performing actions such as a storage vMotion that moved data between datastores on the same array, or cloning virtual machines, the ESXi host performing the action was required to read the data from the array up through the ESXi host, and then write it back to the array, creating additional load on the ESXi host and traffic on the storage adapters and network.