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showing posts tagged with 'vmware'
Selective deletion of tasks, events, and historical performance data in vSphere 5.x and 6.x
edited by on January 11th 2019, at 10:04

In the event of migrating your old vCenter Server to a new version (or from Windows to the appliance), it may become necessary to first clear out old historical data. Not only will this speed up the migration process considerably, it will also prevent certain issues which may block the migration from completing successfully.

VMWare provided a KB with database scripts which allow you to selectively purge historical data and decreasing the database size: KB 2110031.

 
PowerCLI: Starting/stopping SSH service on ESX hosts
edited by on December 20th 2018, at 11:17
Starting or stopping the SSH service on multiple ESXi hosts can be a tedious job when having to do this via the vSphere (Web)Client. Fortunately, you can also use PowerCLI to start/stop services quickly. With a little scripting, you can expand this to start/stop services on a set of hosts, a cluster, or the entire vCenter.

First, start PowerCLI and make a connection to the vCenter. For automation, you can use something like this (note that you have to add code for credentials, if needed):

if (-not (Get-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) { Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core | Out-Null }Connect-VIServer vcenter.domain.local

Once that's done, you can ga  ...
 
Updating the vCenter Server Appliance via ISO and CLI
edited by on October 26th 2018, at 13:29

You can easily update your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) offline by downloading a product patch ISO and via the CLI.

Download the latest patch from VMware Patch Download Center. Select VC from the Search by Product drop-down menu, then select the correct version (i.e. 6.0 or 6.5). Download the patch ISO and attach it to the VCSA.

Log in to the shell (using SSH or VMRC) and initiate the update:

  1. Stage the ISO updates:
    software-packages stage --iso --acceptEulas
  2. Optionally, you can view the list of packages to be updated:
    software-packages list --staged
  3. To install the updates, run:
    software-packages install --staged

After the update has finished, you will have to reboot the VCSA.

 
VMWare: mark all optical drives as client
edited by on September 27th 2018, at 11:38
It is best practice not to have an ISO mounted on a VM if it is not necessary. This is especially the case with VDI: if you forget to set the optical drive back to client, each of your desktops will have the ISO mounted as well, which can create a hassle with dependencies on the datastore where the ISO is located.

With PowerCLI, you can quickly resolve the matter with this one-liner:

Get-VM | Get-CDDrive | Where {$_.ISOPath -ne $null} | Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$false

For VDI, note that this will not work for replicas and master images containing snapshots, as the dependency remains intact if a snapshot exists where the ISO was still mounted. In that case, it is better to clone the m  ...
 
VMware vConverter: A File I/O Error Occurred while accessing ''
edited by on July 3rd 2018, at 14:58
When using VMware vConverter Standalone 6.1 or newer, performing a P2V may fail very early in the process with the following error:

Error
FAILED: A file I/O error occurred while accessing ''.

You can work around the issue by enabling Use proxy mode on the Destination System page at the conversion wizard. As an alternative workaround, perform the P2V directly to a ESX host.

The reason for the error has to do with the ESX host's certificate not being trusted when performing a P2V to a vCenter.

If the Use proxy mode does not resolve your issue, please check whether the FQDN of the ESX host is resolvable on the machine running vConverter. Even when using strictly IP addresses, the FQDN still  ...
 
ESX: enter/exit maintenance mode via CLI
edited by on January 17th 2018, at 11:29

You can use either esxcli or vicfg-hostops to enter/exit maintenance mode.

esxcli

  • Enter: esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true
  • Exit: esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable false

vicfg-hostops

  • Enter: vicfg-hostops --operation enter
  • Exit: vicfg-hostops --operation exit

Note that you can use vicfg-hostops --operation info to check whether the host is finished with entering maintenance mode or is still busy.

PowerCLI

After connecting to the host or vCenter server:

  • Enter: Get-VMHost <name-of-host> | Set-VMHost -State Maintenance
  • Exit: Get-VMHost <name-of-host> | Set-VMHost -State Connected
 
Server returned 'request expired' less than 0 seconds after request was issued
edited by on January 17th 2018, at 11:10
When attempting to register the vSphere Replication appliance to the PSC, you may encounter this error:

Error
Server returned 'request expired' less than 0 seconds after request was issued, but it shouldn't have expired for at least 600 seconds.

On the appliance, look in the log file /opt/vmware/hms/logs/hms.log: if you see messages similar to the following, the time of the replication appliance and the PSC may not be in sync.

/opt/vmware/hms/logs/hms.log
2017-01-14 06:57:00.694 ERROR com.vmware.vim.sso.client.impl.SoapBindingImpl [main] (..client.impl.SoapBindingImpl) | SOAP faultjavax.xml.ws.soap.SOAPFaultException: The time now Wed Jan 18 12:27:31 MST 2017 does not fall in the request   ...
 
PowerCLI: quickly start a service (such as SSH) for all hosts
edited by on December 14th 2017, at 14:03

Sometimes, you need to temporarily start a service (such as SSH) to perform some maintenance task. PowerCLI can help you with this:

To start the SSH server on each host of a vCenter:

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | ? {$_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH"} | Start-VMHostService

To stop the SSH server:

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | ? {$_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH"} | Stop-VMHostService -Confirm:$false

As always, you can make adjustments to the oneliner to select another service to start/stop, or further limit the selection of hosts to a cluster or a group of hosts (e.g. filtered by name).

 
PowerCLI: quickly set log partition for ESX hosts
edited by on December 14th 2017, at 14:00
If you're making changes to the datastore, setting up a new cluster and have a lot of hosts, and wish to set up system logging, you can do so very quickly using PowerCLI.

First, add all the hosts to the vCenter like you normally would. Then, connect to the vCenter server and run this cmdlet:

Get-VMHost | % { $vm = $_ $vm | Get-AdvancedSetting "Syslog.global.logDirUnique" | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value "True" -Confirm:$false $vm | Get-AdvancedSetting "Syslog.global.logDir" | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value "[DataStore01] ESXiLogs" -Confirm:$false}

The cmdlet above will set the system log location to a folder on DataStore01 and enables unique log di  ...
 
PowerCLI: get a list of VMs, their folder and datastore
edited by on December 12th 2017, at 12:35
When performing large storage migrations, it may be useful to get a list of VMs and the datastore and/or folder they are located in. PowerCLI can provide this very quickly:

Get-VM | Select Name,@{N="Datastore";E={[string]::Join(',',(Get-Datastore -Id $_.DatastoreIdList | Select -ExpandProperty Name))}},@{N="Folder";E={$_.Folder.Name}}

You can further pipe this to other cmdlets (such as Where-Object to filter even more), or export it to a CSV.

You can also go into more detail and determine the location of each virtual disk (VMDK) of each VM:

Get-VM | Get-View | % { $name = $_.Name $_.Layout.Disk | % { New-Object PSObject -Property @{ Nam  ...
 
Create an UEFI-bootable ESXi 6.5 USB installer on Mac
edited by on October 9th 2017, at 14:42
To create an UEFI-bootable USB installer for ESXi 6.5 (or newer) on a Mac, follow the steps below.

First, you'll need an USB flash drive. Any recent drive will be large enough (you'll need at least 512MB). Also, download the latest ESXi installer ISO from My VMWare. You probably need a My VMWare account.

With the prereqs in place:

Insert the USB flash drive in the Mac and start up Disk Utility.

Erase the USB flash drive and choose to format it:Partition map = MBR

Filesystem = FAT32

Give it a descriptive name of your choosing.

After erasing the drive, we still have to mark the one partition on it as "active". Disk Utility does not support this and needs to be done using Termi  ...
 
Determine whether View Connection Server is standalone or replica?
edited by on September 28th 2017, at 14:36

If for any reason you need to determine whether a specific instance of VMWare View Connection Server is installed as a standalone server or a replica server, you can do so by looking into the registry.

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM, the value ServerInstanceType will indicate which type the CS is:

1 = standalone/first CS
2 = replica CS

Note that this doesn't really matter, as the only difference between them is whether they set up a new ADAM instance or connect to an existing one. After the installation of VCS, they are identical.

 
Get Hyper-V to work in a VMWare virtual machine
edited by on August 23rd 2017, at 14:11

Hyper-V does not allow to be installed on a machine that's already virtual (such as on another Hyper-V or VMWare). For VMWare, you can circumvent this by adding custom configuration parameters to the VM's configuration.

Add these to the VM's configuration, either through the vSphere (web)client, or by directly editing the VMX-file:

hvh.enable = TRUE
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE

If you're editing the VMX-file, you need to enclose the values (behind the =) in double quotes (").

 
Drive in Windows still displays old size after extending the partition
edited by on August 22nd 2017, at 13:49
After successfully extending a partition on a VM, Disk Management shows the correct partition size but Explorer still shows the old size, even after a reboot.

The reason for this is that while the partition has been extended to the new size, the filesystem itself has not. Normally, Disk Management should first extend the partition, then the filesystem, but for some reason, the second part did not happen.

To resolve, perform an extension of the volume using diskpart.

Open an elevated command prompt and start diskpart (type diskpart and press Enter).

List all volumes to find out which volume number corresponds with the drive you need to resize: DISKPART> list volume



Select the volume  ...
 
List of sysprep files for VMware Converter
edited by on July 24th 2017, at 17:19
In order to succesfully convert Windows systems to a VMware virtual machine, you need to install the sysprep files of the to be converted host. Below is a list of downloads to these sysprep files:

The base folder of where to put the files is always:

Quote
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone\sysprep

Extract contents to: base-folder\2k

Available in SP4 or the CD-ROM of Windows 2000 SP4 at Support\Tools\Deploy.cab

Extract contents to: base-folder\svr2003

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=14830.

Extract contents to: base-folder\svr2003-64

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8287.

Extract cont  ...
 
List of VMware vSphere clients
edited by on June 26th 2017, at 09:53
A list with direct links to VMware vSphere clients. Saves you a lot of time when you need to (re)install many different versions.

Starting with 6.5, the vSphere client is no longer available.

VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Update 3: VMware-viclient-all-6.0.0-5112508.exe

VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Update 2a: VMware-viclient-all-6.0.0-4437566.exe

VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Update 2: VMware-viclient-all-6.0.0-3562874.exe

VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Update 1: VMware-viclient-all-6.0.0-3016447.exe

VMware vSphere Client 6.0: VMware-viclient-all-6.0.0-2502222.exe

VMware vSphere Client 5.5 Update 3d: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-3705931.exe

VMware vSphere Client 5.5 Update 3: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-3  ...
 
Independent Disk option in VMWare Fusion
edited by on June 9th 2017, at 13:31
In VMWare Workstation and vSphere ESX, it is possible to set disks to be independent so they are not linked to snapshots. Independent disks can then be set to be Persistent (changes are written immediately and permanently to disk) or Non-persistent (changes are lost when the VM powers down). In VMWare Fusion, although this option does not seem to be present, it is still available, and can be configured by manually changing the parameters in the VM configuration file (.vmx).

A VM configuration file is a text-based file containing all the parameters and properties for a VM. This file can include options that are not present in the Fusion UI. By adding parameters manually, you can enable featu  ...
 
PowerCLI: quickly set storage path policies to Round Robin in VMWare
edited by on May 8th 2017, at 14:32
A very common practice when setting up SAN storage on a VMWare cluster is to configure the storage path policy to be set to "Round Robin" to properly benefit from MPIO in addition to standard failover. However, if the cluster consists of many nodes or there are many volumes, this can take up quite a lot of time if you configure this using the (Web)GUI. A better way to adjust the setting for the entire cluster is through PowerCLI.

The one-liner:

Get-VMHost <Cluster-or-Host> | Get-ScsiLun -LunType "disk" | Where {$_.MultipathPolicy -ne "RoundRobin"} | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy RoundRobin

The cmdlet selects a cluster or host, gets all LUNs which are of   ...
 
List virtual disk info (incl SCSI ID) for a VMWare VM using PowerCLI
edited by on April 11th 2017, at 14:03

I wrote a script to list virtual disk information for a specified VM, including VMDK path, SCSI IDs and more. It is loosely based on this script but excludes all WMI info.

Download here.

 
Installing Nimble NCM on VMware directly from internet
edited by on February 16th 2017, at 10:08

It is possible to install the integration plugins for VMware on an ESX host directly from the Nimble website, provided your hosts have internet access:

  1. Place the host into maintenance mode.
  2. Connect to the host through a shell (e.g. SSH).
  3. Run the command:
    esxcli software vib install -d http://update.nimblestorage.com/esx5/ncm
    Wait for the installation to complete.
  4. Take the host out of maintenance mode and continue with the configuration.
 
showing posts tagged with 'vmware'
 
 
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