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 […]
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 […]
Unable to remotely connect to new Microsoft SQL server
I rarely do configuration of Microsoft SQL server, as usually someone else will already have installed and configured it before I arrive. Yesterday however, I arrived at a customer with a new Microsoft Small Business Server SQL server. The installation wizard has been completed but nothing else. I tried to connect using SQL Management Studio […]
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 […]
Windows Server 2008 – PING: transmit failed. General failure
Today I had a customer who suffered from a power failure on one of their servers. After powering it on again they experienced a myriad of issues. Most of them were quickly fixed but they could not get the network to work correctly. It could not retrieve any DHCP information, could not ping anything on […]