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. The flings are not supported by VMware Global Support Services, so the general recommendation is not to use these tools in production environments. The engineers and product managers are usually quite responsive via the comments section on the Flings website and social media. ...
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. The big benefit of lodging the SR through Support Assistant is that you get the chance to automatically gather logs for different entities in your environment and these logs are automatically generated and uploaded to VMware as a background task. You can also manage existing SRs through support assistant to add comments, upload files or generate more logs ...
The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 using the GUI installer, where the PSC and VC roles are installed on the same servers. This deployment model is perfect for smaller environment where Enhanced Linked Mode is not required. The PSC Topology Decision Tree is a great read if you aren’t sure on how you should deploy these core components given your requirements. If you are interested in also seeing other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. ...
The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well. Please find the video for the VCSA Embedded CLI deployment below. This has been recorded in FullHD, so best to watch it in Full Screen! ...
The post below will walk through the deployment of an external vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node and Platform Services Controller (PSC) to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well. Please find the video for the VCSA External CLI deployment below. This has been recorded in FullHD, so best to watch it in Full Screen! ...
[toc] Introduction So I’ve finally had some spare time to download and have a look at some of the vSphere 6.5 components and I’ll be planning to do a few blog posts in early 2017 on some of the cool new features that have been added in this release. I’ve decided to start with a few posts on the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using both the new GUI installer and the CLI option as well. I’ve put the links immediately below, but I’ve also written a little about the VCSA below in this article which you may like to read as well. I’ll walk through the deployment of an embedded VCSA as well as an external deployment with 1 PSC and 1VC node. The individual posts below include both a video and text with screenshots. ...
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. ...
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. ...