VMware PowerCLI Discover VMs Restarted by VMware HA (Host Failure)

VMware HA (High Availability) is a great feature, but if the failure occurs when you are not watching it you may well need to know what was affected. You can use VMware PowerCLI to query vCenter for the VMs that have been affected by a host failure causing an HA restart event. I’m assuming that […]

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VMware vCenter – “Exception in invoking authentication handler User password expired”

An appliance that was deployed over 90 days old with no changes made to the default settings. When attempting to logon to the VAMI console of the appliance i.e. https://vcenter.domain.com:5480 you get the message: “Exception in invoking authentication handler User password expired”. To resolve this you need to reset the password, then set it not […]

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Deploying VMware OVA “Certificate is not trusted” or “Invalid Certificate”

When attempting to deploy a VMWare OVA via vCenter you may see an error such as the following: One possible solution (which might work for you) if you can’t get a suitable replacement OVA is to use the OVFTool (which you can download from VMware) to strip the certificate from the OVA, effectively creating a […]

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VMDK Failed to Clone (copy) – Invalid Change Tracker Error Code (7228)

When attempting to copy (clone) a VMDK, we were experiencing the issue that a copy of a VMDK would get to about 100% then fail. Performing via the Web UI or via the CLI (from a host directly) would give the same issue. We attempted this on another VM and it worked fine, it turned […]

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VMware vCenter SSO Authentication via OKTA (with SCIM User Provisioning – Locally Driven)

VMware vCenter can use a multitude of authentication methods, such as LDAP, Active Directory and SAML (ADFS), however since vCenter 8.0 U1 the ability to integrate with OKTA for authentication has been added, which allows for adding MFA (multi-factor authentication) for enhanced security and detaching the vCenter appliance from Active Directory. When switching to use […]

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VMware Host Profile and the the option “uservars.suppressShellWarning” or “UserVars.SuppressHyperthreadWarning”

We had some older VMware hosts where there is a warning about a host being vulnerable to a particular CVE relating to the processor type, in this case the fix was not possible, but we still wanted to suppress the warning. When applying the normal Host Profile it was grumbling about this shell warning, so […]

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VMware Ansible – Getting Started Examples

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is managing infrastructure using a DevOps type methodology. Where the current configuration of your infrastructure is represented in code, any additions, changes or deletions are also made through this code. There are various methods to codify your infrastructure, some proprietary like AWS Cloudformation, others are generic like Ansible or Terraform. The […]

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