If you need to perform packet captures on virtualized appliances, it can be useful to get a statically linked binary of "tcpdump" on hand, especially because tools such as a compiler or package repositories are not on hand on those appliances.

You can download the latest statically linked binary of "tcpdump" via Github:

https://github.com/yunchih/static-binaries/blob/master/tcpdump

When attempting to join your vCenter appliance to AD, you may get the following error message when clicking the Join button:

Error
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException

This is known behaviour when running vCenter with an external Platform Service Controller (in HA mode) but the issue may persist even after upgrading vCenter to a new version with the option to switch to an embedded PSC. You can work around the issue by performing the domain join from the CLI (through SSH):

Connect to the vCenter appliance through SSH (if it's still an external PSC, connect to that instead).

Unless shell access is already activated, use the shell command to enter the regular shell.

Run the followin  ...

To successfully provision Snom phones using SRAPS, you'll need these access using these servers and protocols/ports.

• To secure-provisioning.snom.com (52.28.89.237), open outbound port HTTP and HTTPS (TCP 80 and 443).
• For XML-RPC API, also open outbound port 8080.

When attempting to log onto a Data Domain's management webpage, sometimes you may run into the issue where you are not able to log on, and the following error appears, even though you have not upgraded the firmware or there's nothing wrong with installed SSL certificates.

Service Not Available
The GUI Service is temporarily unavailable. Please refresh your browser. If the problem persists, please contact DataDomain support for assistance.

While the webpage does not work, it is still possible to log on using CLI (through SSH).

If you have not upgraded DDOS, try restarting the web services by logging on through CLI and running the following commands in sequence:

adminaccess disable httpadm  ...

In VMware, using VMFS-6 as the datastore filesystem introduces automatic storage reclamation. This process, also called "VMFS unmap" runs in the background (by default at low priority so it doesn't interfere with performance) to clear allocated unused storage space by sending "unmap" commands to the underlying storage so it can reclaim the blocks for other uses.

Sometimes it may become necessary to (temporarily) turn off (or on, if it's turned off already) storage reclamation on a datastore. You can do this through the WebClient but if you want to change this for a bunch of datastores, you can also do this via PowerCLI. While the latter is pretty complicated, William Lam  ...

By default, VMware Tools are automatically updated when power-cycling a VM each time a new version is available. This may not be desirable, and currently, there is no way to change this behaviour anywhere in the settings. This setting can however by changed manually on a VM-basis, by manually editing the VM's configuration file (.vmx).

Although there's mention of a global setting in Fusion's configuration files, many users report this as not working, so I only mention the per-VM setting here.

First, make sure your VM is not running. Preferably, close VMware Fusion entirely (⌘ + Q).

Using Finder or Terminal, navigate to the VM folder. When using Finder, you'll need to right-click you  ...

Coredumps are used for analysis and debugging if/when a ESX host "crashes" with a "kernel panic". This is visualized by a purple screen (often called PSOD, similar to Windows'es "Blue Screen Of Death").

VMWare ESX 5.5 and newer introduces the ability to perform coredumps to a file instead of a partition.

To configure this, you need access to the ESX host's CLI (either through vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), directly on the host through console or SSH, or some other method). For this to work, you need "root" access (or the equivalent of it through vMA).

Once logged on, take a directory listing of the VMFS datastores to determine on which datastor  ...

After migrating your on-premise Exchange mailboxes to Office 365 using Hybrid method, and subsequently decommissioning your on-premise Exchange, you may run into the issue where it is not possible to enable the in-place archive for a mailbox through the online Exchange Admin Portal or ECP. Attempting to do so will trigger an error.Microsoft has released some Powershell scripts to work around the issue. You can run the scripts to enable or disable the in-place archive for a certain mailbox. The script does not need any prerequisites other than the Powershell AD module and the user running the script must have the proper permissions as outlined on the downloads page.

https://docs.microsoft.co  ...