VMware

So as everyone has probably seen, vSphere 6.5 is now GA. One of the features i have been waiting for the most is vCenter HA. I have spent some time trying to get this working in my lab. Unfortunately after countless tries i was stuck. Thanks to folks in the vExpert Slack for helping me try to resolve this, but unfortunately this was a case for VMware Support. Every time I would try to configure vCenter HA using the Advanced Wizard, I would get the following error.

So as everyone has probably seen, vSphere 6.5 is now GA. As usual right away I have upgraded the homelab and have already found a neat new feature. When you are adding in your VMware licenses, you now have an option to Import License Keys Data… To start you need to generate a report from my.vmware.com. Log in and Navigate to Download Reports Click on the Available Reports dropdown, and select the Product Licenses, Details and History.

I have been in process in configuring traffic shaping for multiple port groups. It seems with PowerCLI 6.3 R1 there are no native Powershell Cmdlets. Luckily I stumbled across @Lucd and his PowerCLI functions to manage these settings, i have put these into a script to mass get and set the settings for all port groups of a DVS’s. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script Get-VMwareTrafficShapingSettings.ps1 Set-VMwareTrafficShapingSettings.

I have been having issues ever since I updated to vSphere 6.x getting the Cisco Drivers to properly update through VMware Update Manager(VUM). Every time I would run through a compliance check, they would always report they were up to date even when they were running an older version. I have recently made a breakthrough working with VMware Support and stumbling through some old blogs. Cisco Support has been terrible on this issue and after repeated attempts to get this case escalated i think the 10th time is a charm.

So currently Cisco has an issue with installing their ENIC and FNIC VIBs through Update Manager for ESXi 6.x. Until that is resolved I need to manually push out patches to these hosts. Obviously I do not want to do this manually, so I will be utilizing PowerCLI to accomplish this task. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script Install-HostVIB.ps1 Preparing to Execute the Script The script is pretty straight forward, just need to define a few variables seen below and then you execute the script.

I have been constantly trying to figure out the best way to deploy updated agents to some of our virtual desktops. It isnt a large environment so I have no need for SCCM or other deployment tools, but its big enough having to RDP to each VM was a pain. I finally decided to bang out a script, and surprised how well it works. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script InstallVMSoftware.

We have multiple clusters within our vCenters that are defined as a rack. Each rack has its own storage, so storage is not shared between clusters. I needed to develop a way to easily replicate templates between clusters, so a local copy existed on each cluster to take advantage of VAAI. I really wanted to utilize the vSphere Content Libary for these, but there is currently no publicly available documentation on how to deploy a VM from a Content Library via a Script.

For the past week, I have been troubleshooting the strangest issue. I have been attempting to move some Windows 8.1 VM’s from our legacy datacenter(iSCSI) to our new datacenter(FC). Whenever I would move the VM to our new DC, it would fail to boot properly. It would boot straight to Windows Recovery. If I moved the same VM to any other type of storage(NFS, iSCSI, Local) the VM would boot perfectly fine.

Welcome to my post about upgrading your VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to 6.0 U1b. This process is very straight forward. We will begin with updating our Platform Service Controllers (PSC) and then proceed with the vCenter Appliance. SSH to your Primary PSC. If you are currently in the bash shell, type appliancesh to switch shells to run the update. Run software-packages install –url –acceptEulas to download and install the packages from the VMware Repo.

Normally when i need to install and update a host VIB I use Update Manager. However there is currently a bug with Cisco’s latest enic/fnic drivers that wont let you install them via UM. I had to run these updates on over 50 hosts and I really didn’t want to have to ssh and install it manually. Lucky I remember Brian Graf’s Host Client Install Fling and borrowed some of the code to come up with the below script.