Hi all, This is just a quick note to let you all know of a limitation with vSphere 6.5. Repointing of a vCenter Server to a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in another vSphere SSO domain SITE is not supported. Please see the caution at the top of this VMware KB article. Note: As of 21/11/2016, the KB article for repointing a VC to a PSC WITHIN the same SSO domain site (see here) also has a caution to say it is not supported with 6.

[toc] Introduction Well, another vForum Australia event has come and gone this week and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on my few busy days spent in Sydney attending this event. This was my third time attending vForum, and this roughly reflects how long I’ve seriously been working in the VMware ecosystem. While the last two years were OK, this year was my favourite by far, most likely due to not being afraid to meet new people and get involved in some events.

Introduction Just a quick post to say I’ve written a couple of powershell functions to deal with Raw Device Mappings and perennial reservations within a vSphere environment. Although I do try to avoid them, some customers do still have RDMs in their environment, mostly for Microsoft failover clusters configured at the virtual machine layer. Some ad-hoc scripts exist for this at the moment, but I wanted to break out the ‘getting’ of RDMs and then setting them to perennially reserved.

I’ve always tried to use and recommend using the ‘least privileges’ model when designing and implementing systems. But we’ve all been there, when the same service account is being used to connect everything to vCenter, and said account has been assigned the full administrator role and propagated within vCenter. I’m getting my lab set up again and I needed to install VMware Update Manager (VUM). I realised that in the lab previously I have just done as I mentioned before and used a high privilege service account thinking “it’s just a lab”.

A long last, VMware have made a tool available and supported to migrate from a Windows installation of vSphere 5.5 across to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.0U2. VMware gave us a teaser with a fling in 2015, but this was taken down and there have been hints dropped via Social Media and most recently some good sessions for the migration tool at VMworld 2016. Prior to this tool, migrating from a Windows install to the VCSA was not a trivial task.

Introduction This article will walk through the steps required to repoint a vCenter Server 6U1 or later node to a different Platform Services Controller (PSC) node. Scenario one will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located within the same vSphere SSO site, where as scenario two will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located in a different vSphere SSO site. This is almost the same process, but repointing a VC to a PSC in a different SSO Site than the original PSC requires an additional step.

Introduction Starting with vSphere 6, there are two main roles to a core vCenter infrastructure. The vCenter Server (VC) and the Platform Services Controller (PSC). During deployment, administrators are presented with two deployment options: Embedded. With an embedded deployment, the VC and PSC roles are installed on the same node External. With an external deployment, the PSC and VC roles are installed onto separate nodes. External deployment also enables the enhanced linked mode feature for vCenter Server Prior to 6.

Edit: At the time of publishing, the main page at www.vmworld.com is not rendering correctly (it is just showing a blank white page where the videos should be), though it was a few days ago. The URL that should be displaying on the vmworld URL below is http://www.webcastregister2016.com/vmware/form.php, and you can go directly to this URL to access the videos if the URL below is not working when you try.

In the busy world we live in, a lot can be said for the “time flies when you’re having fun” saying. And with so much happening in the world of the SDDC, it’s easy to forget about some of the core components that, for the most part, sit there reasonably quietly just ‘doing their thing’. This is just a quick reminder post for those still running vSphere 5.0 or 5.1, that end of general support ends for those products this week, on the 24th of August to be exact.

OverView Back in vSphere 5 a new VAAI primitive called unmap was released. When using thin provisioned volumes or LUNs for VMFS datastores, actions such as storage vMotion, consolidating snapshots and deleting data (such as VMDK files) do not automatically reclaim the space on the underlying datastore. For example, if you have a thin provisioned 1TB datastore that has 2 x virtual machines using 400GB each, and you delete one of these virtual machines (using the ‘delete from disk’ action), the used space on the datastore will still report as 800GB.