A student last week asked me if it was possible to download patches automatically from hardware vendors instead of manually downloading the patches. This is indeed possible and below I will show you the steps for configuring it. Currently the vendors I am aware of providing online depots are: Brocade: http://www.brocade.com/downloads/documents/vibsdepot/CurrentRelease/BCD-depot-index.xml Dell: http://vmwaredepot.dell.com/index.xml HP: http://vibsdepot.hp.com/index.xml Step […]
Configure Custom Alarm for Virtual Machine disks consolidation is needed
Last week I delievered a VMware vSphere Fast Track course and the question came up if it was possible to configure an alarm for Virtual Machine disks consolidation is needed. The issue is if you look at the overview of VMs such as hosts and clusters view you will not be able to see if any […]
Warning! Do NOT upgrade to vCloud Director 5.5 if using SQL server 2005 SP4
VMware has issued an alert that vCloud Director users should NOT upgrade to 5.5, if they are using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 4 as their database. If you attempt to upgrade the process may fail and you will see an error similar to: Exception in thread “main” java.lang.IllegalStateException: java.sql.SQLException: Cannot assign a default […]
Veeam Backup & Replication error Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.
Today a customer called me with an issue getting Veeam backup of one VM that had previously worked without issues. His environment was VMware vCenter 5.1 U1 and Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 patch 3. The error recieved was: Error: Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. This is […]
EqualLogic error: Volume has fewer than expected replicas
Today a customer called me up. He had two EqualLogic units setup with replication from one to the other. After setting this up and verifying replication worked as expected he started to recieve e-mails like this: [ID: 4.18] Schedule <name of schedule> for volume <name of volume> has fewer than expected replicas. Expected 1, but […]
EqualLogic reclaim space from VMware ESXi datastore
Today I visited a customer to perform a health check. Their system consisted of VMware ESXi hosts running on EqualLogic SAN storage. The volumes on the EqualLogic were thin provisioned and one of them were running ALMOST full plus a good way beyond the warning limit. As you can see the usage is exceeding the […]
Dell PowerConnect switch stack missing ports
A customer called me while configuring two new Dell PowerConnect 6224 switches in a stack. After stacking the switches no ports on unit 2 would link up. The web interface also looked wierd: As you can see above the switch looks like it has no ports at all. As we can read in the Dell […]
VMware ESXi Storage vMotion fails with error The method is disabled by ‘vm-3556’
This week a customer called me. He was unable to Storage vMotion a VM from one datastore to another in his VMware ESXi 5.1 environment. The error shown was: The method is disabled by ‘vm-3556’ My first suggestion was to perform a regular vMotion to a different host and then retry. Unfortunately this did not […]
Veeam B&R Error: Client error: VDDK thread terminated
Last week I was onsite with a customer deploying Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. One of their remote sites had just one VMware vSphere ESXi host running standalone. To simply their setup we decided to add it to the vCenter. We then proceeded to deploy a proxy on a virtual server on the remote site […]
VMware vSphere Web Client error The Requested resource () is not available
Today I was at a customer deploying a new setup using VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 Update 1. Everything new! We decided to install all of the vCenter services such as Single Sign On, Inventory Service and Web client onto a new Windows Server 2012 VM. Everything went fine, until I attempted to connect to the […]