VMware Tools 10.3.0 - Abort mission!

Posted on September 7, 2018

VMware rolled out the latest version of the VMware Tools in version 10.3.0 but recalled them quickly afterwards due to an issue with the VMXNET3 network driver for Windows. In some cases the symptoms can be a Purple Diagnostic Screen (PSOD) or guest network connectivity loss. Not fun… Virtual machines... [Read More]

Review : Altaro VM Backup

Posted on September 5, 2018

There is a sea of products on the market to backup virtual machines and they all provide more or less the same core functions. In order to stand out from the crowd and gain popularity, one has to offer innovative features, proven reliability, simplicity to use... [Read More]

Certificate replacement: PSC UI vs certificate-manager

Posted on July 9, 2018

If you ever had to replace certificates in vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 you may know that there are two different ways to do it. The first one using the PSC web UI and the second one using the embedded certificate-manager utility. Now you may also think that these... [Read More]

Faulty HBA troubleshooting

Posted on June 7, 2018

After moving an ESXi host to another rack, I encountered a really strange behaviour. The hosts are Fujistsu servers and are connected to an EMC FC SAN. After the host was installed in its new rack, when we powered it back on some datastores were missing but not all of... [Read More]

Certificates: Don't use common name as identifier

Posted on May 29, 2018

I recently encountered a certificate issue while working on a project when the certificate was being rejected in a web browser. At first my certificate looked fine, the FQDN was in the common name field (CN) and I had a bunch of Subject Alternative Names (SAN) as well. When I... [Read More]

Deploy Log Insight in Workstation

Posted on May 20, 2018

If you want to run Log Insight in Workstation (most likely for a lab), you will realise that once you deployed the appliance, all the settings you configured in the wizard have been diregarded. Note that the following is not supported by VMware and should only be used for labs... [Read More]

Set password of an sso user to never expire

Posted on May 4, 2018

In vCenter, users created on the vSphere SSO domain (vphere.local by default) all share the same password policy defined in Single Sign-On > Configuration > Policies > Password Policy with a default password expiration after 90 days. For “interactive” users it’s probably a good thing to keep them on their... [Read More]

How to silence VSAN health checks

Posted on April 25, 2018

The VSAN health checks are great in vCenter to quickly notice when something wrong is going on. However there may be some of the health checks that you don’t want to come up as warning. As an example, lots of vCenter implementations don’t have access to internet by design and... [Read More]

Certificate replacement in vCenter HA configuration

Posted on April 11, 2018

Recently I had to change the default certificates of a newly installed vCenter. Nothing unusal with that, if not for the fact that I didn’t think about vCenter HA that I configured before getting the certs. If only I had read that little piece of advice from VMware… ... [Read More]

Passive node down in vCenter HA 6.5

Posted on April 2, 2018

This issue is fixed in vCenter 6.5 update 1. I recently logged on a VCSA 6.5 that had been installed a while back with vCenter High Availability (VCHA) and noticed that the passive node was down. After a few checks, the VM is running, I can... [Read More]