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. You will be asked which account you would like to select, and if there was a specific timeframe to select. In my case i have selected all accounts and …

I am about to start down my path of studying for my VCAP6-DCV Design Exam. I figured I would throw up the blueprint and fill in each section as applicable. Either way here is the blueprint laid out for anyone who may benefit. This is it as of 7/25/16.

Section 1 – Create a vSphere Conceptual Design

Objective 1.1 – Gather and analyze business requirements

Skills and Abilities

Existing Content from VCAP5-DCD

Today I took my VCAP6-DCV exam. This exam was announced with a two week availability in the US priced at $100.

My experience with the exam was actually pretty good. The new interface for the advanced exams is that of an HOL. You are dropped onto the desktop and have a window that slides in and out to pull up the manual and other consoles.

I would definately read up on Josh Andrew’s post about what to expect.

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.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 …

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 will walk you through the process.

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.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 will walk you through the process.

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. I am hoping when that is available, I will update this post.

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. I opened a case with VMware and our Storage vendor and no one had any idea what was causing it.