The ramblings of a computer geek
VMware gives the capability to “snapshot” a powered on or powered off virtual machine, preserving its state at a particular point in time. Although this is a very useful feature, is it not intended as a long term backup, archive or for example a pre-upgrade/change state backup. A snapshot allows an administrator to create a … Read more
You can install VMware PowerCLI via either the online installer, i.e direct into PowerShell, or via an offline installer. The offline installer instructions can be found here. For online installation, you can perform the following steps: Step 1 – Open PowerShell, you may need to “Run as Administrator”. Step 2 – Install all PowerCLI modules … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Recently Broadcom have moved all VMware customers over to their support portal. Broadcom have a “Site ID” for each customer, so they created one for everyone migrated from VMware. The missing bit was how you get that Site ID, you need this so you can request access to your support and product entitlements. Step 1 … Read more
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 … Read more
When performing a VMware vCenter Upgrade for example from version 7 to version 8, you use the upgrade tool, this essentially works in two stages. Stage 1 deploy a new vCenter appliance on a temporary IP address, then Stage 2 copy all the configuration and data from the old vCenter appliance and then take over … Read more
We had a request to enable AVX2 on a virtual machine. AVX2 are virtualisation extensions, essentially its providing processor instructions through from the physical CPU that are for optimizing virtualisation. In simple terms allow a virtual machine to be able to run virtualised workloads. You would need to enable this setting if you wanted to … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more