How to shrink VCSA logical volumes before an upgrade

I found that especially when you migrate Windows vCenter servers to the VCSA you might end up with a deployment size that is less than optimal. Some people say; don’t worry, it’s just thin provisioned. But I’m an old-school guy and I like to keep things neat and simple. The …

Remediating Host with ESXi 6.5 VUM “The host returns esxupdate error code:15 error

The other day I was patching a couple of hosts on one of our environments. All worked out fine until I got one host that refused to update from vSphere ESXi 6.5 U1 to ESXi 6.5 U3. Throughout the day this host actually gave me loads of different errors. In …

Slow boot times ESXi with (p/v)RDM’s easy fix

Recently we have been having (extremely) slow boot times for a couple of hosts that we’ve been using for a new customer. We actually didn’t really notice this in the beginning, until we added hosts to the existing cluster and the reboot for that host took over 3 hours! The …

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 …

How to get vCD 9.1 and higher to work with vCloud Usage Meter 3.6.1

Since we are in the process of adding a boatload of new products to our environment and services, we needed to add our new vCloud Director instances to our vCloud Usage Meter environment. For those that don’t know; VMware vCloud Usage meter is used to measure the license usage for …

How to fix an expired VCSA Machine SSL certificate with a bugged vmware-eam service

Recently we’ve had some weird issues on one of our customers vCenter Servers. For starters the vMotion and Storage vMotion features weren’t working anymore because of time-outs. Which is weird and something I’ve never seen before. So we started troubleshooting the VCSA server and noticed that it couldn’t retrieve the …

vCenter Appliance (VCSA) Web Client timeout settings

Recently we had a customer asking us if we could change the timeout on the vSphere Web Client because they had some issues with the default 120 minutes / 2 hours that are configured in the vCenter settings. Changing this is rather simple and can be done in the following …

Veeam 9.5 U3a with VMware vSphere 6.7 U1

The other day we had to use our Veeam environment together with a customers vSphere environment to migrate, well actually replicate in Veeam terminologies, a couple of virtual machines to our environment. The vSphere environment was pretty new, which we don’t see that much with our customers. The version was …