One of my visitors posed a question in another post of mine on how to upgrade the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESX 4.1 to U1. To prepare for this post, I downloaded ESXi 4.1 from VMware and installed it in VMware Workstation. I also have the 4.1 version of the vSphere client. And without further [...]
VMware vSphere 4.1 U1 released February 10th
February 10, 2011 By 6 Comments
Big release today for the VMware vSphere 4.1 suite. Depending on the size of the environment you support, you’re either cheering at the small amount of work ahead of you, or sobbing because you just recently got everything updated to 4.1
VMware: Odd issue with NFS datastores
February 7, 2011 By 4 Comments
I’ve noticed something odd with a number of clusters that I administer that have NFS datastores. One of the datastores will be duplicated, and end with (1). Typically, only one host has this duplicated datastore. At first I thought it happened because the datastore was mounted twice, once by IP address, and again by hostname/FQDN.
VMware Host Profiles: compliance issue and fix
January 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
I thought I’d take a moment to write down some frustrations I’ve been having with VMware Host Profiles, and how I resolved it. Before I get into that, let’s take a second to discuss what they’re supposed to do, and how you can get it in your environment. Host Profiles is a VMware vCenter feature [...]
Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI
January 23, 2011 By 16 Comments
The other day I was looking at my virtual machines’ VMware Tools status, and sadly, many of them are out of date. It seems like I spend a lot of my time on host patching, but the Tools update seems to fall by the wayside. Perhaps it’s the disruption to production that rebooting causes (and [...]
Managing VMware HA’s VM Monitoring: PowerCLI
January 13, 2011 By 4 Comments
In a previous post, I discussed my need to manage HA isolation response and restart priority settings on a per-VM level (separate from the cluster settings). This post is a continuation of that topic, but covers how to manage the VM Monitoring aspect of VMware HA with PowerCLI. At the time of writing, there are [...]
VMware HA Restart Policies: PowerCLI
January 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Recently I received a request to disable any automated HA actions on specific VMs across our infrastructure. To some folks that might sound a bit crazy, but there was good reason: an outside vendor supports an application and wanted to be involved any time the VM was powered up/down/etc. They have contractual obligations with business [...]
Controlling VMware Update Manager patch staging: PowerCLI
December 16, 2010 By 5 Comments
As you may be aware, VMware Update Manager has functionality built-in that allows the VMware administrator to stage patches to hosts, for remediation at a later time. There are a number of downsides to the way this functionality is implemented in the VMware VUM GUI.
Automating VMware cluster remediation without DRS: PowerCLI
December 14, 2010 By 3 Comments
As you may be aware, VMware’s Update Manager (VUM) does a great job of remediating vSphere hosts when they’re in DRS-enabled clusters. You select the cluster you want to remediate, verify the correct baselines are attached, and click Remediate. VUM will automatically evacuate each host in turn, then patch, reboot, repeat as necessary until the [...]
ESXi 4.1 remote log collection with VMware vMA 4.1
November 10, 2010 By 10 Comments
When I first decided to blog about this, I started doing some Googling for resources. I ran across an excellent post by Simon Long that talked about using vMA’s vilogger capabilities for remote logging, but his blog post was written with 4.0 in mind, and didn’t line up exactly with how things are done with [...]
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