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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VMware
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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ESXi 4.1 remote log collection with VMware vMA 4.1
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 vMA 4.1. My goal here is not to reinvent the wheel with screenshots galore, but merely to document the basic steps and differences in the setup for vMA 4.1.
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OVA’s and OVF’s: What are they, and what’s the difference?
Chances are good that you’ve run into an OVF/OVA from a variety of sources: as a packaged application or appliance from a vendor, as a download from the VMware community appliances site, or even while physically moving virtual machine files from one location to another.
I admit, when I first started administering VMware, I didn’t understand what an OVF or an OVA were, and what their differences are. In order to best understand the differences between the two, let’s take a look at what an OVF is first.
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