When running workloads in the Public Cloud such as Amazon Web Services, you have a bunch of options when it comes to block storage. How do you know which one to pick? There are alot of choices–tradeoffs, features and sprawl can also occur. In this blog I will cover the different types of disks available to help educate you on some of the purposes and limitations of each. I previously covered what this looks like in Microsoft Azure and figured now would be a good time to cover the differences in AWS.

When running workloads in the Public Cloud such as Microsoft Azure, you have a bunch of options when it comes to block storage. How do you know which one to pick? There are alot of choices–tradeoffs, features and sprawl can also occur. In this blog I will cover the different types of disks available to help educate you on some of the purposes and limitations of each.

Next up in our Automating your vSphere Upgrade blog series is your VMFS Datastore. vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 both support the latest VMFS-6. Once all of your ESXi hosts that are connected to the VMFS-5 datastore have been upgraded to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7 you can then proceed to migrate your datastore to VMFS-6.

Another lovely Friday starting off with strange issues, when taking a host out of standard maintenance we noticed that HA would not reconfigure, and kept saying The object ‘vim.Datastore:datastore-1131’ has already been deleted or has not been completely created. This was strange because no other hosts had this issue.

I proceeded to follow standard troubleshooting steps, reconfigure HA…same issue….disable HA for entire cluster and …

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.

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?”

1. Unmount Datastore
2. Detach LUN
3. Un-map from SAN
4. 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. All the LUN’s will be detached without having to manually …

So as always things change across multiple Window’s operating systems and VMware revisions. I had a need to extend the drives on about 50 VMs today and really didn’t want to do all that clicking. I remember awhile back it was easy to do this with a Basic Set-Harddisk and use the -ResizeGuestPartition but alas that has been removed from the current functionality. So I took my search to google and found a couple scripts that worked ok, but nothing that was a seamless experience.

For upcoming testing there was a need to create 140 datastores on a cluster for testing. Who wants to do that much clicking and typing? Not me! You can use the below PowerCLI commands to get the SCSI ID’s,  Create the Datastore and then Rescan all hosts in the cluster.

How do i get the CanonicalName for allocated disks?

1Get-SCSILun -VMhost 192.168.1.103 -LunType Disk | Select CanonicalName,Capacity

How do I create a VMFS datastore for the CanonicalName I identified above?

1New-Datastore -VMHost Host -Name Datastore -Path CanonicalName -VMFS

How do i rescan all the hosts in the cluster …

After upgrading vCenter this functionality is no longer enabled by default. Please perform the following steps to enable rename of files upon successful Storage vMotion.

1. Log into the vSphere Client as an Administrator
2. Click Administration > vCenter Server Settings
3. Click Advanced Settings
4. Add this advanced parameter key:

• provisioning.relocate.enableRename

5. Set the value to: true
6. Click Add
7. Click OK
8. Restart the VMware VirtualCenter Server service for the changes to take effect