Using localcli on ESXi for troubleshooting

Just a small ESXi Pro tip this time. I recently had a host that was experiencing issues and the management services were unresponsive. This is a major problem for troubleshooting as the esxcli commandset won’t work anymore at this stage. Now by accident I came across a tip from the …

Security update: VMSA-2020-0006 / CVE-2020-3952

The 9th of April VMware issued a new VMware Security Advisory (VMSA) VMSA-2020-0006. This Security Advisory discusses CVE-2020-3952 in length. The vulnerability received a CVSSv3 score of 10 out of 10. Which means this is a very serious security issue. This also means you should patch your vCenter Server environment …

vSphere 7.0 completely transforms VMware’s portfolio!

Introduction vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes is going to be released soon! The announcement just went live today during the “Modern Apps Virtual Event”. A couple of weeks ago I followed multiple sessions regarding the new VMware and vSphere product releases and updates and witnessed all its beauty. Today the NDA …

Ancient VMware View Scripted Reporting

A while ago I was working on a very very old VMware View environment. Yes, you’ve read this correctly, a VMware View environment. This is even from before the product was officially called “VMware Horizon View” back in 2015. So, the subject I was working on for the customer, but …

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 …

Round up virtual hard disk size

Quick post of something I ran into this week. When creating new VMs it makes sense to create disks that have a certain size in GB. But sometimes when migrating workload from one platform to another you might see some funky hard disk sizes like this.

Fixing this for …

Clearing ESXi System Event Log (SEL) via PowerCLI

We recently noticed some hosts in our environment that show an alert triggered by ‘Status of other host hardware objects’. Upon further investigation it turned out that this was caused by the system event log (SEL) that is about to run out of space. Now if you don’t mind not …

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 …

Incorrect PostgreSQL object ownership prevents vCenter upgrade

Recently I had to upgrade a vCenter Server Appliance with embedded PSC from version 6.5 U2e to 6.7 U2c. It seemed a pretty straightforward process like the upgrades I’ve done before. But this time the upgrade failed because of an issue with the PostgreSQL database. I examined the logfiles and …