In-place upgrade of 2012R2 DCs to 2019

Although this blog is mosty centered arount VMware related topics I sometimes find myself presented with other challenges in the field. In this case I needed to upgrade a couple of Windows domain controllers to Windows Server 2019. However because the existing servers were bare metal and I had no …

Windows shows unspecified MediaType with VMware Workstation

Lately I’ve been running some Storage Spaces Direct labs on VMware workstation. Part of doing labs means testing things until something breaks and as a countermeasure I tend to create snapshots frequently. Now this led me to an issue that I haven’t seen anyone write about online. It turns out …

Beware: Windows Server 2012 reboot loop after November or December 2019 SSU patch

In November and December 2019, Microsoft released a few new patches just like any other month to patch certain issues in Windows Server 2012. It has recently come to my attention that these patches seem to break Windows Server 2012 virtual machines! They appear to cause a reboot loop, which …

VMCI Sockets bug and missing MSR partition prevents VSS-aware backup (fixed)

Recently I had to do just that when a customer I recently on-boarded to our vSphere platform was having issues creating a VSS-aware backup. Even a quiesced snapshot command failed with an error. This issue took quite some time to investigate. And I was lucky enough to have a support …

What hypervisor is my linux VM running on?

Lately I’ve been responsible for migrating quite some VMs from a Hyper-V platform to vSphere. One of the applications I migrated started experiencing some intermittent network issue. And sure enough it turned out the old VM was started again. This left me wondering; how can I check what hypervisor I’m …