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 […]
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 […]
Delegate permissions on My VMware site
Today I had to open a support case on behalf of a customer with VMware. When you call VMware to open the case they will request your customer number. Now when they say YOUR customer number they mean it. They are not asking for my customers customer number, but instead my own unique customer number. What […]
Dell ESXi PSOD LINT1 motherboard interrupt
Last week a customer encountered purple screen of death on their ESXi 5 installation on Dell hardware. Here is a screenshot of the error: After some research I ended up on Brian Wuchner‘s blog who suggested to diable the following two settings in the server BIOS: After disabling these two settings and rebooting the server the PSOD […]
VMware vSphere CLI missing libxml2.dll
Today a customer called reporting unable to install the EqualLogic MEM module for VMware using vSphere CLI. He recieved the following error: The program can’t start because libxml2.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem. A search on his computer revealed that the file was in fact installed together with vSphere […]
VMware ESXi 5 unable to vMotion with error 0xbad0060
Yesterday I was at a customer who complained his VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1 environment was unable to vMotion between servers. He saw two different error messages: A general system error occurred: Failed to initialize migration at source. Error 0xbad0060. Necessary module isn’t loaded – and – A general system error occurred: The VMotion failed because […]