The ramblings of a computer geek
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
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Keeping a VMware ecosystem up to date is a challenge. Ensuring you are running a supportable and stable combination of VMware ESXi, device drivers, extensions and hardware firmware is a lot of moving parts to keep “in synch”. Essentially the version of the device drivers needs to be supported by VMware ESXi, the version of … Read more
A fairly common error with a fairly easy fix. When adding the Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) I was seeing this error message: “some error occured while online deport registration” The error appears here, the “important notes” gives you the clue to the fix. You need to ensure that your iLO Amplifier appliance(s) are not … Read more
If and when a log disk begins to fill up you will see messages such as “Log Disk Exhaustion on <vcenter name>”. Within the vCenter console and VAMI you can see the log drive is running low on space. If you are using VMware HA for vCenter, i.e. two vCenter appliances, you will need to … Read more
We had a VMware ESXi host start to display this following a networking instability issue. The host was checked and it did indeed have network redundancy, so this message was not correct, and appeared to be stuck warning about a condition that did not exist. Resolution is given in: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2008602, and in our case just … Read more
The Microsoft licensing agreements are made based on the number of processor cores (or sockets) that are in use by the physical or virtual hosts that make use of Microsoft software. The Microsoft licensing allows for a VMware ESXi host’s CPUs (or cores) to be licensed instead of the vCPU (virtual CPUs) of each virtual … Read more