A few days back i had an interesting chat with one of my customers. I’ll provide some background information before going in to the actual problem statement. Background information. The vSphere setup includes: Rack servers 2 x 8 core CPUs per ESXi host. 192 GB RAM per ESXi host. 2 x 1 port Fibre Channel …
Last week i had a discussion with a customer regarding the vSphere Distributed Port Group Teaming and Failover configuration Failback (Failback) when using the Teaming and Failover: Load balancing configuration “Route based on physical NIC load” aka LBT. All available dvUplinks configured as Active uplinks. We discussed if the Failback configuration makes a difference regarding virtual …
During every vSphere design and Health Check the vSphere advanced settings are being discussed and every once in a while i receive an email asking me what vSphere advanced settings i normally use and recommends. I know Duncan Epping wrote a blog post about when to use the vSphere advanced settings a while ago. In general i agree …
This blog post applies to the vCenter Server version 5.1.0.880146 and ESXi version 5.1.0.799733. Today i ran into an issue with the Snapshot Consolidate feature. The vSphere Web Client informed me that a “Virtual machine disk consolidation needed” was required for my VM. The virtual machine is backed up by vSphere Data Protection 5.1.0.56.179 and …
A customer contacted me the other day asking for a way to verify if the ESXi host TSM-SSH (SSH) service is running, and if so: Turn off the TSM-SSH service. Send an e-mail report including all ESXi hosts where the TSM-SSH service was stopped. The customer’s vSphere administrators sometimes enable the ESXi host TSM-SSH service …
Last week i was contacted by two customers facing the same problem. Both customers running vSphere 5.1 U1 and ESXi 5.1 U1 and they couldn’t start one or more virtual machines and received the following error in the vSphere Web Client: The useful option to submit an error report in the vSphere Web Client adds …
I was recently asked by one customer to verify the existing Bridge Protocol Data Unit (BPDU) Filter configuration for their 75+ ESXi hosts and if needed (not activated) change the default configuration from the value “0” to the value “1” to activate the feature. This blog post will focus on the PowerCLI configuration and not explaining …
I want to highlight a risk in one of my previous designs and also explain what you can do to avoid it, if you get approval from the customer. The VMware vSphere versions referenced in the blog post are VMware vCenter Server 5.1.0b 947939 and VMware ESXi server 5.1. Background Below i have listed a few …
A few days ago a new customer asked me to review the PowerCLI script used for the initial ESXi host configuration. The ESXi hosts are factory installed and the most recent batch of ESXi hosts were all configured with the “VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5 License” license. This means the initial ESXi host automatic PowerCLI configuration …