When you don’t use something for a while, you tend to forget how valuable it can be. Even from its very early iterations, ESXi has been able to display CDP information so you can quickly establish “what’s patched where “. Easy to get from the gui, but far more useful Continue Reading
ESXi
vSphere/ESXi: When good tasks go bad – Fix with ESXCLI via PowerCLI
Most of the time, tasks we start in vSphere just work. That’s why we love it. Queue ’em up, and move onto something else. Sometimes though, they go bad. They freeze, stick, die or just plain error out. This happened to me last week. After changing the scratch location for Continue Reading
ESXi/vSphere 5.5 U2: old NFS/vMotion issue reincarnated “remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy”
Uh oh, an old issue seems to have been reincarnated in vSphere 5.5 U2 which may cause vMotions of guests on NFS storage to fail with the error: remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy This issue was first evident some time ago where it affected V4.1 and was subsequently fixed Continue Reading
Heads up ! – EMC PowerPath/VE 5.9.1 & VMware ESXi 5.x potential disruption
It’s HEADS UP! time again, as usual courtesy of an EMC TA bulletin. ‘VMware ESXI hosts may become unresponsive after adding or removing LUNs when running PowerPath/VE 5.9.1’ This doesn’t sound like a particulalry fun way to start or end your day so read on if you want to avoid it; Continue Reading
VMware ESXi CBT bug PT3 — ESXi 5.5 now fixed.
This now becomes the 3rd post regarding the infamous Changed Block Tracking bug that was/is evident in all versions of ESXi 4+. If you missed them, Part 1 & Part 2 Finally today we see the bug squashed in ESXi 5.5 with the release of Patch ESXi-5.5.0-20150104001-standard (2099271). This still leaves Continue Reading
ESXi – Driver VIB update using ESXCLI
Nothing groundbreaking here folks, but this is a quick and easy way to upgrade the drivers (in this case Network Intel & Broadcom) on your host(s) I’ve done this many times for various reasons: Misbehaving drivers after upgrades, Version control, “’cause I wanna’”. etc Login to your host with the Continue Reading
VMware PowerCLI – Suppress vCenter Certificate warnings
A very quick post this one, but an annoying thing I often see left unchecked in environments, that is simple to fix in a minute. Yes, this is an old topic, but it’s still too evident today…. This should be in your “just do it” category. It’s the awful Certificate Continue Reading
PowerCLI – What went where ?
I had a nice little episode with a set of PSOD looping hosts in December which resulted in a lot of guests getting moved around automatically during attempted HA recoveries. This got me thinking about all the automation that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ as a result of DRS and HA. Continue Reading
Auto ESXi Host Configuration Backups with PowerCLI
Regularly throughout the year, I like to take PIT (Point in Time) backups of my ESXi host configurations. These form part of my Critical Config backups that I hope I’ll never have to use. But like any backup, these are merely another safety net as we strive to have more Continue Reading
VMware ESXi CBT bug — FIXED, sort of.
I’ve previously posted in detail about the VMware ESXi CBT bug here It’s taken a while but VMware have today released patches to address this issue for older versions of ESXI 5.0 & 5.1 Disappointingly, still no fix for ESXI 4.0 and more importantly ESXi 5.5 (Rumoured to be coming Continue Reading