So I am in the midst of setting up a vSphere 6 POC and it has been a bit since I played with it. I came across a problem I thought i would document and share. While trying to setup my Platform Service Controllers for HA. I was having issues sshing into the appliance. I kept on getting errors, that the packet sizes were too big or just authentication would fail.

Horizon 6.2 Introduced Biometric Authentication, with initial support for TouchID on IOS devices. This post will explain how to enable it, as its not really something greatly documented right now. I think they are aware and hopefully in a future update this will be easier. Here is a link to the current VMware documentation. NOTE: This feature does require a 3rd party trusted signed certificate to work. From my current testing and speaking with others self-signed certificates will not function.

I had the opportunity to upgrade my Horizon View environment from 6.1 to 6.2. As always VMware has made this very easy! First download the bits from here. The upgrade documentation can also be found here. Warning: In my environment I do not have a composer server, if you had one this would be upgraded first The upgrade order is as follows. Composer Server, Connection Servers and then Security Servers.

I wanted to share this handy script i created when you have a need to extend a disk. This script can be extremely handy as it will take care of extending the VMDK and then going to the OS and then performing the expansion there as well. This has been helpful when needing to extend a large batch of servers (60+). Syntax: .\ExtendVMDKandGuest VMNAME You will then be prompted to enter in the Hard Disk #, the size you want to be extended, and then which drive letter that volume belongs to.

I thought I would share this script, its been circulating a bit but I feel it is a nice one to have in your toolkit. Have you ever had to remove a LUN from a cluster and thought “Do I really need to detach all the LUN’s, before un-mapping from my SAN?” Unmount Datastore Detach LUN Un-map from SAN Rescan Cluster Well here is a handy script with output. All you need to do is unmount your datastore(s), and then enter in your naaid of your LUN’s and the cluster you want to remove it from, save it an execute.

Today vSphere 6.0 U1 is released. This is normally the update everyone waits for before upgrading their production environments to the latest version. I think the first time in awhile, a lot of people will wait. You see, VMware has had a bug KB2124669 since ESXi 6.0 that can cause an ESXi host to randomly lose connection, freeze and overall act really terrible. With the release of 6.0U1 it still exists.

Did you know you could get host your own blog on Ravello Systems? Its actually quite easy and even easier with Jekyll. Jekyll is a great static content platform perfect for hosting your blog. It is all based on html/css/markdown and requires absolutely no database. Please use my previous [blog]({% post_url 2015-09-08-how-to-deploy-a-jekyll-blog %}) on how to get it deployed. Disclaimer: This is in no way supported or recommended by Ravello Systems, running this 24x7 even with 1CPU will consume most of your free trial/vExpert hours.

So after getting my blog up and running I figured I would do a quick how-to, on how to get a blog up and running. Its actually something you can do in less than 15 minutes. 1~ $ gem install jekyll 2~ $ jekyll new myblog 3~ $ cd myblog 4~/myblog $ jekyll serve 5# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000 and you will see the blog running! Easy Enough? Now how do you create a blog post?

So as I was getting around to trying to get a host platform setup for a Jekyll blog I was looking at an alternative to GitHub Pages. I decided I would run it on Ubuntu Server using NGINX as the web platform. Here is a quick vagrant runbook that will quickly get a linux server deployed and install NGINX to host your website. The code can be found here. The bootstrap_linux_nginx.

New Blog Platform! I have had a bit of issues with performance on my blog recently and looking on how to not overpay for hosting services. A good friend of mine suggested using Jekyll and GitHub Pages, so I took the challenge. Within a day I was able to get my blog posts exported from Wordpress and published on a new platform and it was quite simple! Be on the lookout for some upcoming posts.