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

PowerCLI – Break glass in case of emergency

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 Continue Reading

VAAI- Hear me now, believe me later

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 Continue Reading

VMware ESXi CBT Bug – Your data may be at risk

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, Continue Reading

EMC Recoverpoint+VMware SRM – ‘discover Arrays’ failed.

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 Continue Reading

vSphere – “Another task is already in progress..” fix with esxcli

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 Continue Reading

vSphere PowerCLI – Snapshot handling

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 Continue Reading