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 units within our company, and wanted to be sure that their application stack was started in an application-graceful way.
[Read more…] about VMware HA Restart Policies: PowerCLI
File upload failed: VMware Update Manager
I ran into a really annoying error recently while trying to upload a host upgrade to VMware Update Manager. The upload kept failing with the error message "Failed to login. Error was: A web exception has occured during file upload". (Yes, I know that word isn’t spelled right. /Sigh @ VMware QA)
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Finding mismatched NFS datastore UUIDs: PowerCLI
I’ve run into an issue lately in my VMware environment that really frustrated me because I didn’t understand why it was happening, and because there wasn’t an obvious way of determining that it wouldn’t happen again. The problem I’d been having was mismatched UUIDs on NFS datastores on clustered hosts. It’s a configuration issue that isn’t apparent until you need to vMotion a VM or are relying on HA/DRS.
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Controlling VMware Update Manager patch staging: PowerCLI
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.
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Automating VMware cluster remediation without DRS: PowerCLI
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 entire cluster is remediated.
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