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Every now and then I need to find the version and build number of VMware vSphere Update Manager that is running in a customer’s environment. I’ve written this post mainly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully it helps someone else down the track. VMware have a KB article for most of their products to correlate the build numbers with versions. The specific article for VUM is KB 2143837. Sometimes these aren’t always right up to date unfortunately. ...

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience. I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never had any industry certifications and in 2016 I made it a bit of a personal goal to chase a few down. Towards the middle of the year I decided to pursue the VCP6-DCV certification. Because I was new to the certification track, I had to do the foundations and VCP exams. I passed both in June. From there I was looking at doing a Microsoft Exchange / Office365 certification because I worked a lot in this space at the University, but July was when I changed jobs and my focus shifted. ...

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 6.5. I believe this is a mistake in the KB article, as the 6.5 documentation has steps on how to repoint within the same SSO site, and I’ve reached out to the product manager Adam Eckerle who also believes this is an error and is investigating. ...

[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. Earlier this year I had a career change, and when that happened I had some moments of clarity which also resulted in me wanting to achieve some personal goals as well, and a big part of that is around community involvement. Although it is early in my own personal journey, having a glimpse into the great communities that are involved in different pockets of the IT world has been an eye opener and is an area I will personally be trying to put a lot of focus into, all while trying to manage that work / life / family balance thing! ...

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”. I thought this would be a good chance to check what privileges are actually required to install and register VUM with vCenter Server. I’ve quickly documented the steps below including the only privilege that is required. ...

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. I undertook this at my previous employer, where we had 2 vCenter Servers, around 10 clusters and approx 70 hosts. While a lot of it was scripted, it was still a very involved process, as we had distributed switches, a number of cluster, host and VC advanced settings etc. Along with that, the historical data was not transferred across so we had to be OK with not migrating that data. ...

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 6.0U1, you had the ability to repoint a VC node to another PSC within the same vSphere SSO site using vmafd-cli. See VMware KB 2113917 for the steps. You could not repoint the VC node to a PSC in a different SSO site, even if it was in the same SSO domain. ...

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. Just a quick post to note that the recordings for all of the breakout sessions from VMworld 2016 US are now available online at this URL. ...