Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.x to 6.7
I’ve been running a vCenter 6.0u2 appliance (VCSA) since my home lab was built in 2016. Its been very stable, and with the issues of the early 6.5 versions I’ve been reluctant to upgrade. With 6.7...
View ArticlevSAN and memory usage alerts for home labs
After using NFS-based storage in my home lab for a number of years, I wanted to try out vSAN. This was to play with the technology itself, as well as to make my storage a little faster where needed for...
View ArticleTaking screenshots of VM consoles
A client of mine asked for assistance in identifying virtual appliances in their environment, in order to tag them for future work they had planned. As they had many thousands of VM’s, it would have...
View ArticleFatal error: 33 (Inconsistent data)
After a recent power outage that lasted longer than my UPS runtime, I found that one of my ESXi hosts wasn’t online. A quick look at the console screen showed that ESXi had attempted to boot and failed...
View ArticlevDS version mismatches during cross-vCenter migrations
While migrating VM’s between a 6.0 and 6.5 vCenter, I came across an error that stopped the migrations from happening. The error was “The destination distributed switch has a different version or...
View ArticleMelbourne VMUG UserCon 2019
VMUG UserCons are a free, one-day conference on topics related to VMware, its partner ecosystem and career enhancement. The day is organised and run by local VMware User Groups all around the world....
View ArticleESXi 6.7 U2 breaks jumbo frames within VLAN trunk portgroups
I came across this post by /u/thakala on Reddit, which covers a scenario where ESXi 6.7 U2 is apparently causing dropped packets for Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) workloads. No specific support...
View ArticleFinding ESXi hosts with IP conflicts
I recently had a client with some ESXi hosts having intermittent issues with NFS storage. After checking vmkernel.log (and confirming via vodb.log) I found that these hosts were reporting IP conflict...
View ArticleValidating free IP’s on a non-routable subnet
In conjunction with my previous post about IP conflicts, I thought I should share a script I created. When you are talking about the networking subnet that your VM’s live on, or the management subnet...
View ArticleReplacing a failed vSAN cache drive
My home lab has been running with primary storage provided via an all-flash implementation of VMware vSAN for almost 4 years now. The underlying drives are consumer-grade Samsung 850 EVO 120gb (cache)...
View Article