Using pcap filters with pktcap-uw on ESXi
A feature that was introduced in vSphere 7 is the ability to use pcap (tcpdump) filters with pktcap-uw. One of the use cases where this can be useful is filtering for TCP control bits.
Check ESXi installation date using Powershell
Have you ever found yourself wondering when a certain ESXi server was installed? In this case VMware GSS has your back. Check out KB 2144905 to find a simple esxcli command that dissects the hosts UUID to give you the installation date of that specific host. But what if you want to audit an entire cluster? This is where Powershell can help you out.
UsageMeter not sending data to vCloud Usage Insight
Today we have another UsageMeter issue I would like to discuss with everybody. I’ve been using UsageMeter since the old days so I’ve seen pretty much everything there is. But this time I was surprised to learn something new on these things. Last month while I was reporting our UsageMeter …
Nested ESXi 7 interoperability with ESXi 6.7
The nested ESXi appliances that William Lam provides to the community are great resources for testing. But what about interoperability? Can you run a nested ESXi 7 VM on a ESXi 6.7 server? Unfortunately the answer is; it depends. We can’t all be early adopters right? I currently work in …
Fixing the UsageMeter 4.3 to 4.5 upgrade issues
Recently we had to upgrade a couple of our VMware Usage Meter environments. VMware Usage Meter is a tool that monitors all VMware based software solutions on the licences they are using. These numbers are used to report your license usage to your aggregator. This piece of software is mostly …
How to recover from deleted VM files
Recently I found my self having to recover a VM that had most of it’s files deleted. They were removed by a script that was intended to clean up a staging datastore. Unfortunately the VM in question was left on that staging datastore and the script did it’s magic. The …
Async methods in vSphere Web Services API
Today I had an experience that was not very different than some of the ‘I was today years old’ memes which are floating on the web. I was working on a script to detach a LUN on all hosts within a cluster when I stumbled on a contribution from LucD …
Using Runecast to fix missing NIC in ESXi
The problem In my homelab I’m using a server which contains both Gigabit and 10GbE NICs. When I first deployed ESXi version 7.0U1 the list of devices looked like this.
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Name PCI Device Driver Admin Status Link Status Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description ------ ------------ -------- ------------ ----------- ----- ------ ----------------- ---- ----------- vmnic0 0000:02:00.0 nmlx4_en Up Down 0 Half xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 1500 Mellanox Technologies MT27500 Family [ConnectX-3] vmnic1 0000:03:00.0 igbn Up Up 1000 Full xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 2018 Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection vmnic2 0000:04:00.0 igbn Up Down 0 Half xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 2018 Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection |
In this system the Mellanox isn’t connected to a switch (yet). So I didn’t notice this straight away. But …
Building a homelab – Part 2
After careful consideration I decided on what to buy for my first homelab server as explained in part 1. Having used corporate laptops as my daily driver for the better part of the last two decades I seriously can’t remember when I last built a PC. So using a barebones …
vCloud Usage Meter 3.6.1 cannot collect vCenter Server information
Today I have a rather small blogpost for you guys. I noticed that one of my vCloud Usage Meter appliances, still running on an ancient 3.6.1 version build 7359407, had some difficulties collecting data for one of the connected vCenter Servers. I got loads of e-mail messages from the Usage …