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 hosts in a dev cluster, I planned to reboot them… Read more »
Nothing like a bit of Hyperbole, but some days are better than others! One thing I have learned over the years is to always expect the unexpected. Yesterday’s ‘unexpected‘ was one of these; That’s cool, HA kicked in and the stranded guests began to restart as expected. Not great, but it had done it’s… Read more »
VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration) was first introduced into vSphere in v4.1 with promises of deeper integration and control over supported storage Arrays. Each feature (or Primitve) was designed to help us gain benefits from our Arrays. Vendors who didn’t support VAAI were frowned upon and those delivering on it heralded. These Primitives can be summarized in the table below;… Read more »
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a great feature introduced in ESXi 4.0, that effectively brought incremental backup technology to our virtual machines. Third parties were able to leverage this so backups would only require the processing of blocks that have changed rather than all blocks. This saved inordinate amounts of time, data and effort while allowing vendors to support flexible backup… Read more »
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Version check: Recoverpoint 4.0.2, SRA 2.2.0 and SRM 5.5 |
I noticed this little gem today whilst in the process of adjusting some SRM documentation and grabbing some screenshots; I hadn’t received any alerts so didn’t think it was a major issue, but sounded like it’s the sort of error that may be annoying during execution of a Recovery plan. In any case red is bad… Read more »
** Edit, 9th October — Many EMC products now have patches available ** VNX Series1 VNX Series2 XtremIO VNXe –Get busy ! On the 24th September, a series of CVE (Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure) incidents were published and have gained significant publicity (and rightly so) due… Read more »
Hot off the Press ! vSPhere 5.5 Update 2 was made GA. Lots of issues resolved, and a bit of a ‘maintenance release’ imo. vCenter 5.5U2 Release Notes. ESXi 5.5U2 Release Notes. Notable inclusions; Edit Hardware V10 guest settings from the C# Client – Hooray ! And the community breathed a big sigh of relief. … Read more »
I recently had the ‘pleasure’ of an unresponsive vm that had basically turned into a ZOMBIE ! It could not be restarted, edited, snapshot’d and was of course, unresponsive from an OS perspective (No RDP, ping or comms just totally off the air) Any attempted operation from the vSphere client returned “Another task is already in progress” Similar results from remote… Read more »
I’m not particularly enamoured with the vSphere web client, but one thing it has encouraged me to do is get more proficient using scripting/shell utilities like PowerCLI. When it was first released, it showed promise. But I, like many others was unimpressed by the lag and general slowness in navigation and getting things done like we were accustomed to using the… Read more »
Snapshots are cool. We all use them, we all love them. But they can be tedious to manage, and this can lead to them causing issues. Take some care to manage them proactively so they don’t become a monkey on your back. I’ve grown rather fond of managing snapshot functions using PowerCLI. Why? It’s fast, efficient and everything looks cooler… Read more »