vSphere

Physical processors are getting more powerful & supporting more cores. This means that previous vNUMA considerations for Virtual Machines are changing. Essentially Virtual Machines with more cores is possible without breaching vNUMA boundaries. This results in us being able to run VMs with more cores, for example, requirements for mission-critical...

So vSphere 6.7 has been announced but what does this mean for Update Manager? Single reboot on upgrades Historically (Prior to 6.7) when upgrading a host Update Manager will trigger a reboot to prepare the host and then the installer will trigger another upgrade. These reboots add time to the maintenance...

Quite a lot has been going on in April for VMware, so I've put a post together with notable news: vSphere - Next version The next version of vSphere looks to be coming soon. There has been some talk about its upcoming release in the public domain. I'm a Beta...

While everyone upgrades to the latest release of vSphere be aware that there are a few minor catches along the way. A couple I've seen this week include the vague error "An internal error has occurred" This seems to happen more on stage 2 of the upgrade process for either...

A quick post on using Powershell & PowerCLI to email you a list of VMs that are not getting backed up. Also functionality to exclude certain VMs from the check (those that you do not want to backup and be alerted on) Note that this is just a quick post,...

As of vSphere 6.7 VMware no longer supports VMFS version 3 datastores. If a vSphere ESXi 6.7 host mounts a VMFS3 datastore, it will be automatically upgraded to VMFS 5. This automatic upgrade process is in-line and does not impact the availability of virtual machines, however this upgrade process will...

This is a very quick post on the use of SSL certificates and vSphere. As of vSphere 6.0 and beyond VMware have provided a VMCA (VMware Certificate Authority) which by default signs all vSphere SSL certificates (vCenter Server & ESXi) The VCSA is a Platform Services Controller feature, enabled by...

Spectre & Meltdown are hot topics at the moment but how does this affect VMware solutions? VMware have provided detail on their stance on the situation via mostly two KB articles; https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52245 & https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52264 In summary this is what is covered: ESXi, Workstation & Fusion ESXi is affected by Spectre and patches...

I've recently had a few requests to share my vSphere test plans with the VMware community. Good news: With effect today I have reformatted my old test plans and uploaded them to GitHub. Please feel free to download, share & modify these. If you make any modifications or additions and...

Sometimes a virtual machine will not power off via the web client. To resolve this, the process is very simple: Enable SSH on the host that the VM is running on: 2. Login to the host via SSH 3. Run the following command: esxcli vm process list 4. Find the...