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rpowermt – PowerPath/VE licensing
Installing PowerPath/VE onto an ESX host turns out to be rather easy. Licensing it is slightly more fiddly than I would have hoped, but possibly shouldn’t have expected any less… Support > Software...
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VMware, RDMs and EMC Clariion
So here’s an interesting “feature”: I suspect most people with a Clariion also have a licence for Access Logix, aka Storage Groups, i.e. LUN masking. If you have a Clariion but don’t have Storage...
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Tidy/Remove VMware Snapshots – possibly created by NetBackup
Diagnosis I’ve found that sometimes Symatec NetBackup v7.0/7.1 doesn’t remove the snapshots it takes of VMs whilst it’s backing them up direct from the SAN. These snapshots don’t show in the vSphere...
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VMware ESX 4.1 install onto Dell R720 via iDRAC 7 Enterprise
Bit of a fiddle as the ISO of ESX 4.1 update 2 does not contain any suitable network drivers for the R720. This causes it to fail. On other servers, at least the onboard NIC has been detected, so I’ve...
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Dell R720 E5-2690 and VMware EVC Mode Sandy Bridge
This isn’t actually specific to either a Dell PowerEdge R720 or an E5-2690 CPU, any system with an E5-2600 series CPU will likely be in scope of this post. The trick to getting your VMs to change their...
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VMware vSphere Security
What a can of worms this topic seems to be. I suspect it’s mostly because of the stepping on toes that VMware environments cause to medium-to-large size organisations, i.e. those that are big enough to...
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vSphere client: Performance overview not working
Various things seem to cause this to fail. The error reported within the Performance Overview pane of vSphere client is: Perf Charts service experienced an internal error Report application...
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VMware ESX/ESXi issues with Broadcom 5719 quad port Gb NIC
I’ve got some new servers with Broadcom quad port 1Gb Ethernet NICs in, model 5719. Nine of the servers are running ESX 4.1 update 2 502767, one is running ESXi 5.0 update 1 623860. Two servers have...
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Active Directory authentication for ESXi host management
This was not as straightforward as I’d hoped. Apparently (see video – ugh, why not bullet points?), you just add the host to AD, create an Active Directory security group called ESX Admins, stick the...
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Host disconnected in vSphere client II
Here’s another nice vSphere issue, and how to fix it. One of my ESXi 5.0 hosts was showing as disconnected in vSphere client. I tried to reconnect to it by using the right-click Connect option. This...
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Missing Broadcom 5719 tg3 NICs after updates
Just updated one of my R720 ESXi 5.0 hosts. I did the firmware via the Dell OM_711_SUU_FULL_ISO_A00.iso which included things like BIOS 1.3.6 but also updated the Broadcom 5719 NIC firmware. The old...
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VMware Converter Crypto Exception error 02001005
Just installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0.1 875114 by doing a Client-Server installation. I installed the Converter server and Remote access components onto my vCenter server (had to...
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VMFS datastore showing greyed out, inactive and unmounted
I’ve been having “fun” recently with VMware storage issues following a temporary loss of power to one of my two EMC Clariion CX4-480 SANs. The power outage was expected, and the SAN was shut down...
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Bye-bye SAN, Hello Tintri
I first came across Tintri over a year ago, had a look at their product on their website and thought “this sounds rather good”. I’ve chatted to them at IP Expo for the last two years, and recently had...
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vSphere: Convert RDM to VMDK and vice-versa on Windows VM with no downtime
This method will work for non-OS disks (so not your C drive), and will not required the server or application to go down during the process. You need a version of Windows that supports software RAID,...
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Get VMware VM creation date (kind of)
VMware vSphere doesn’t seem to keep the VM creation date in its database anywhere, but if your VMs are all/mostly running Windows (and you have permission to do a WMI query against them) you can get...
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VMware E1000e vmnic Windows Server 2012 data corruption
Found this yesterday: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2058692 “On a Windows 2012 virtual machine using the default e1000e network adapter and running on an ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 host, you experience these symptoms:...
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VMware resource reservations and HA
vSphere HA is the feature that restarts VMs from a failed host on another host in your HA cluster. Brutal, but if a host dies in the middle of the night it might be better than leaving all the VMs down...
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Search for VMware RDMs
A storage admin recently asked me if a couple of LUNs were still in use. They had very little info about them, but knew they were presented to the vSphere hosts. So I wrote a quick script to find all...
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Find vSphere VM locations: Folder, vApp and Resource Pool
The vSphere client doesn’t seem to give you a nice overview where you can see all the location data about your virtual machines. You can see the Folder and vApp by expanding all the branches in the VMs...
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