I was recently invited to try out a beta of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The first thing I noticed is the installer file is only 83 MB! Here are some quick screenshots of the installation: As you can see, not a lot of options during the installation, this ensures everyone can complete the installation without any […]
Unable to login to VMware vCenter with domain accounts: A general system error occurred: Authorize Exception
Today a customer called me because they were unable to login to their VMware vCenter using domain accounts. They saw the following error message: A general system error occurred: Authorize Exception I asked if they had made any changes and they had created two new Windows Server 2012 domain controllers and given them the IP […]
EqualLogic SAN Headquarters Unable to download manager file
Today a customer called me because he was unable to launch the EqualLogic Group Manager from within EqualLogic SAN HQ. It would load 16% and then show an error: Unable to download manager file There was an error downloading the file from the group. The EqualLogic Group was running firmware 5.2.2 and EqualLogic SAN HQ […]
VMware ESXi Single VM is not vSphere HA protected
Today a customer contacted me with a system consisting of 3 hosts running a VMware ESXi 5.0 cluster. They were experiencing one, and only one VM, was complaining about configuration issues: This virtual machine failed to become vSphere HA protected and HA may not attempt to restart it after a failure. The customer had already […]
Upgrade of VMware ESXi 5.0 Dell Custom to ESXi 5.1 Dell custom fails
Today I was performing an upgrade of VMware ESXi 5.0 running Dell custom image to 5.1 Dell custom image using VMware Update Manager. The upgrade seemed to run as usual, but after some time I wondered why the host did not come back up after the automatic reboot. I went to the console and saw […]
VMware ESXi Consolidate virtual machine disk files fails due to read-only lock
Last week I had a customer with a VM that required virtual disk consolidation, however when he attempted to perform this from the vSphere client it would run for hours and unfortunately fail: The virtual disk is either corrupted or not a supported format. I waited till we could get a service window on the […]
VMware ESXi 5.1 unable to mount datastore: Lock was not free
Today I had a customer running VMware ESXi 5.1 on three hosts connected to a Dell EqualLogic SAN. The issue at hand was out of 10 datastores on the SAN one datastore could suddenly no longer be mounted. It showed up as (inactive)(unmounted): Obviously the logical solution would be to just try and mount the […]
Dell Powerconnect 6224 switches not stacking
Last week I was on-site with a customer to install two Dell Powerconnect 6224 switches for use with an EqualLogic SAN. The stack was not configured automatically. I used command show stack-port For some reason the switch detected the stacking modules as 10 Gigabit modules. Fortunately the CLI reference guide has the commands to configure […]
VMware ESXi Upgrade Software or system configuration of host is incompatible
This week a customer called me trying to upgrade his ESXi 5 hosts to ESXi 5.1 using a Dell customized ISO file trough Update Manager. Upon attempting this however, Update Manager showed error Software or system configuration of host esx.domain.local is incompatible. I immediately spotted this and clicked for details: Strangely enough the vSphere client can […]
VMware ESXi VM randomly inaccessible using QNAP NFS
Today I had a customer who seemingly at random times lost connections to their QNAP NFS datastore. This only happend at night however. This is what they saw in the vSphere client: They could browse the datastore without issues and the VM worked fine if they removed it from inventory and re-added it again. Since […]