In my previous post I explained how to quickly interpret a network capture on ESXi by using pktcap-uw and tcpdump-uw. This works great to get some information at a glance. But what if you require some further analysis? Well, then Wireshark is probably your tool of choice. Check out the rest of this blog post to learn how to set up remote capturing so you don’t need temporary storage on ESXi for your capture files.
As a vSphere admin you are sometimes tasked with investigating network issues. You don’t always have VM access so you need to diagnose at the ESXi level. Now as some of you may know quickly gaining insight in VM network traffic by capturing it on the ESXi level is a rather complex task. The tool at your disposal for capturing VM traffic is called pktcap-uw and one of it’s biggest shortcomings is that it doesn’t interpret the packets.
Introduction If you have worked or are working with NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) like me you are probably aware of the known bug that is present on some olders versions of NSX-V. Even the VMware Interoperability Matrix has a remark on this on all versions. The bug I am talking Read more…
Introduction Today we have something different from the ever growing VMware Cloud Director (VCD) blogposts on our blog! The other day I was upgrading a couple of ESXi hosts on one of our environments. This however did not work how it should, the ESXi host would not stage or remediate Read more…
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.
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.
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.
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 Read more…
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. Name PCI Device Driver Admin Status Link Status Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description —— ———— ——– ———— ———– —– Read more…
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 Read more…