Although it’s not mandatory, the Cluster Witness Server (CWS) in a VPLEX Metro Cluster serves a very important purpose as the arbitrator between inter-cluster network partition failures and actual cluster/site failures. It’s a lightweight (<3GB) VMware vm deployed from an OVA that establishes itself in a 3 way VPN between Continue Reading
VMware
EMC RecoverPoint- Standalone VM Recovery
RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup Continue Reading
Back to basics – Hot add new disk to Linux VM
I recently showed this to a colleague who is new to Linux. It should be part of your minimum capabilities as an admin. Manipulating disks/volumes on a guest VM is a task we all have to do. In this post I’m going to detail how to add a new disk to Continue Reading
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