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vExpert 2016 program

Posted on September 21, 2016

A couple weeks ago VMware sent over the emails to notify the new and returning vExperts 2016, and it is with great pleasure that I received mine! The vExpert program is an “award” given to the professionals who get involved in the VMware community by sharing... [Read More]

Hyperion + Lightberry + OpenElec + Kodi

Posted on August 15, 2016

I did this project to create a mood lighting behind the TV that “follows” the colors displayed on the screen and enhance the experience of movie watching. It is pretty much an open source version of Philips’ Ambilight except it can work on a wide range of devices and is... [Read More]

Move VLAN to a different vSwitch

Posted on August 5, 2016

Recently after we had a network change aimed to consolidate our uplinks, I had to move a whole bunch of VMs to a port-group in a different vSwitch but in the same VLAN without losing connectivity. It is a very easy process and not a single ping is lost (maybe... [Read More]

Update from vSphere 5.5 to 6.0 Update 2 using the DCUI

Posted on July 29, 2016

After upgrading one of the hosts in my lab with VUM I had to update the second one in order to install the FVP extension from Pernix Data. My VMs (VUM, vCenter, DNS) were then on this host’s local storage and I couldn’t be bothered migrating them to the... [Read More]

Update a Dell host from vSphere 5.5 to 6 update 2 using VUM

Posted on July 25, 2016

One of the most important operations in running a virtual environment is to perform major upgrade of the system. The vSphere Update Manager simplify greatly the process and makes it look transparent when everything goes well. Even if 9 times out of 10 everything will be fine, it is always... [Read More]

Pingou: ping on steroids in powershell

Posted on July 7, 2016

Pingou is a powershell script that allows to test connectivity using ICMP and open TCP ports on a remote host. This command is meant to be easy to use, intuitive and faster than the built-in Test-Connection and Test-NetConnection cmdlets. Link to the script : Pingou ... [Read More]

vMotion error - Failed to write checkpoint data (offset xxx, size xxx): Limit exceeded.

Posted on June 30, 2016

Still in the process of migrating our dev cluster I was doing a whole bunch of storage vMotions to evacuate our old storage backend to the new one. Most of the VMs went smoothly but I ran into an error on one of them that I never encountered before. The... [Read More]

Network core dump to vCenter and configuration on hosts using PowerCLI

Posted on June 27, 2016

In the event of a PSOD (Purple Screen Of Death) ESXi will try to save a core dump of the vmkernel and a screenshot of the console screen, which can be crucial for diagnosing the root cause of the failure. There are two types of locations that can be configured... [Read More]

Enabling datastore alerts on thin provisioning thresholds

Posted on June 17, 2016

Something every sensible VMware administrator is concerned about is the over commitment of the datastores. Since the dawn of times in virtualization it is possible to thin provision the disks of the virtual machines by not allocating the blocks to it, hence over commit the actual physical storage by provisioning... [Read More]

Use vSphere tags to set VM CPU limits

Assign-TagQOS.PS1

Posted on June 15, 2016

In the majority of VMware environments, the use of limits (especially memory limits) is strongly discouraged as it can lead to several misbehaviours such as CPU ready or memory swapping, which no one wants. But in some cases it can be useful to leverage them, provided it is implemented... [Read More]