If you are configuring a cluster with less than 2 datastores, you will receive an HA warning “The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 1, which is less than required: 2” You can add an option to the HA Advanced Options to supress this warning.

1. Log in to vCenter Server
2. Right-click the cluster and click Edit Settings
3. Click vSphere HA > Advanced Options
4. Under Option, add an entry for das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore
5. Under Value, type true
6. Click Cluster Features
7. De-select Turn on vSphere HA and click OK
8. Wait for all the hosts in the cluster to re-configure HA, then …

When setting up a cluster for testing you may not have 2 nics to use for management. to bypass the warning you can configure HA to not alert you for this issue.

To perform the steps in the c# client.

1. From the VMware Infrastructure Client, right-click on the cluster and click Edit Settings.
2. Select vSphere HA and click Advanced Options.
3. In the Options column, enter das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning
4. In the Value column, type true
5. Click OK.
6. Right-click the host and click Reconfigure for vSphere HA. This reconfigures HA.

To perform the steps in the webclient.

1. From the vSphere Web Client, right click …

This is a great script to keep handy. If you have multiple RDM’s on a VM and need to get the NAA_ID for them the below PowerCLI command will get you that information.

1Get-VM VMNAME| Get-HardDisk -DiskType "RawPhysical","RawVirtual" | Select Parent,Name,DiskType,ScsiCanonicalName,DeviceName,CapacityGB | fl

If you then need to match the SCSI virtual disk to the Guest OS this is a great article on how to do so.

KB2051606

I don’t know whats going on in the past few weeks but the sheer amount of zeroday exploits via email have risen. To protect yourselves against this I would recommend setting up a transport rule to drop or reject any email with executable content. This can be done for Exchange 2013 or Office365 (Exchange Online).

While continuing to build out my lab for VCAP-DCA today I had to deploy the vMA (vSphere Management Assistant). Upon deployment i tried to SSH to it and unfortunately was not able to. By default SSH is turned off, perform the steps below to enable it.

Building out some new servers today I came across an issue where the servers would have no network connectivity even though the vNICs were properly tagged and assign a VLAN ID. Upon further research, I noticed that “Native VLAN” was not selected. This is a must for any operating system that does not do VLAN Tagging such as ESXi.

So remember to set the VLAN to Native if using an operating system that does not support VLAN tagging!

I was working today on configuring NFS/Openfiler in my lab and came across an issue that my nested ESXi host’s couldn’t talk over the VSS (Standard Switch) I created. Upon further research when using nested ESXi you need to enable “Promiscuous Mode” on the VSS to allow the traffic to pass.