VMware

The VCSA appliance deployment has changed to be a Microsoft Windows only affair. Unless you perform a few steps first you could end up with the issues below. PROBLEM: During the deployment of the VCSA appliance you get the following error messages displayed: Failed to set the time via NTP. Details: Internal Error. Code 1 … Read more

If you need to determine the IOPS that are being used of the storage by the Virtual Machines you can run a PowerCLI script to connect to the vCenter and then collect the IOPS statistics. The script collects the read/write average IOPS and the read/write maximum IOPS for each virtual machine, because of this the … Read more

VMware resource pools are a bit weird. They don’t work the way you would assume them to, so it is easy to get the wrong. This article details quite simply how you can use them for an example to illustrate this I will use my live production environment to illustrate how and how not to … Read more

I had this as a challenge, we have SAN replication, so you could replicate and promote your storage to achieve the same thing, but I was looking for a quick and dirty way to get a VM from one data centre to another data centre quickly and easily. So in this example I have two … Read more

Okay so we’ve had VMware since version 3.5, and have upgraded through 4, 4.1 and then a big leap to 5.5 just recently. We started getting some really big issues with performance on some of the VMs, but it was not what I first expected! PROBLEM We had a web and SQL application server (Virtual … Read more

PROBLEM: In VSphere client, click on “Plug-ins” then click on “Download and Install” alongside the “Vmware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Extensions” when prompted run the installer. If you get the prompt saying that: “VMware Vsphere Client Version 5.5 needs to be installed before Vmware VCenter Site Recovery Manager can be installed.” you need to do … Read more

We purchased some new servers for a new cluster and wanted to move from ESX 4.1 to ESX 5.5. This means going from ESX to ESXi which removes the service console and some settings need to be different. This will show you how to configure the first four NICs of the server into a 4 … Read more

We recently upgraded our ESX hosts to ESX 4.1 U1, upon applying the 4.1 U1 update and then rebooting the server we found that the network adapters had all changed themselves to 1000Mbit Full Duplex. However we had everything set at “Auto Negotiate.” The fix was simple, change this back to “Auto” on the ESX … Read more

I’ve been upgrading our ESX hosts to the latest version. From ESX 4.1 to ESX 4.1 U1 (Update 1), its been a little more complicated than i’d like, but here are the strange things i’ve found. Note this is performing the upgrade using VUM (VMWare Update Manager). Downloading The Update Finding the correct package to … Read more

I’m still trying to get VMWare 3.5 installed completely and servers virtualised. But utlimately it would be nice to use vSphere4 in the end. Heres a good PDF showing the new features and how the licencing works (which has been made a bit more complicated! http://www.boche.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/VsphereData.pdf