The ramblings of a computer geek
The Path Selection Policy is set for devices to determine how the ESXi host will utilise the paths to the storage, for example, you can have “Fixed” or “Round Robin” or “Most Recently Used”, you can also have storage vendor provided ones such as “NIMBLE_PSP_DIRECTED”. The scripts and commands I’ve found keep mentioning “Multipathing”, if … Read more
We had a very odd situation occur on one of our VMware ESXi 7.0.3 clusters (VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20328353), which is using iSCSI with HPE Nimble Storage. Some new storage was presented to the hosts via iSCSI. The first host was scanned, the datastore prepared as normal. Once complete, then started to perform a re-scan … Read more
Hashicorp’s Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) declarative language that allows you to define the existence and state of objects within your infrastructure and then publish this new state to your infrastructure. Terraform is agnostic of platform, you can use a wide range of “providers” to manage a number of different infrastructure components from … Read more
I had a host that was showing devices with no datastore, saying “Not Consumed”. This is what you’d expect to see for a device where the device has yet to be formatted with VMFS. Now in this case it definitely had a VMFS filesystem created. The fix for this was fairly simple. Essentially the host … Read more
You may see the following error when attempting to perform an upgrade to a host, the issue is also described in: https://www.vcloudnine.de/upgrade-to-esxi-7-0-missing-dependencies-vibs-error/ We came across this issue when attempting to upgrade to version 7.0.3 of VMware ESXi, these hosts had some driver VIB updates performed over their lifetime to remediate PSOD issues. Upon attempting an … Read more
If you are having trouble uploading a file via SCP to vCenter then VMware provide a great document on how to resolve this. You’ll be seeing an error like: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107727 Essentially what you need to do is logon via SSH to vCenter, swap the Shell to BASH, upload the file, then swap the Shell back … Read more
We were performing the migration to new Distributed Switches (running a later version) ready for our vCenter 7.x and ESXi 7.x upgrade and when attempting to remove a host from a distributed switch we got this error: VMware has an article KB76959 that describes this issue, however in our case rather than the VM (or … Read more
If you wish to test the connectivity through from your VMware ESXi host through to its storage when using iSCSI you can perform steps such as the following described within: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003728 Firstly run this to get your list of vmKernel ports: Assuming you’ve labelled the vmKernel ports you use for iSCSI with something sensible you … Read more
VMware have recommended that upgrading from Distributed vSwitch version: 6.0.0 to 6.5.0 or 6.6.0 should be done as a side by side migration rather than an in place upgrade due to the risk of outage when performing the upgrade in place, this is detailed in the following VMware article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc/GUID-330A0689-574A-4589-9462-14CA03F3F2F4.html. It is understood that vDS … Read more
How do you name your VMware datastores? Its an interesting question, how much information do you want to convey? Do you want to give a system administrator some idea of the data protection provided by the underlying storage perhaps? Or some idea of the location? There’s lots to think about, but also simplicity can be … Read more