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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Relocating VM’s with “vDS host error: see faultCause” issues
Introduction The other day I was trying to move a couple of virtual machines on one of our environments and I faced some awesome general system errors! Great. I’ve seen these before and figured I’d write this in a quick blogpost this time around. The error message I faced from …
Something to consider while upgrading ESXi in a vSAN environment
Introduction A couple of weeks ago I started upgrading an environment that is configured with VMware vSAN. This on itself isn’t a difficult task nowadays. It does however become somewhat problematic if you receive all sorts of errors on the vSAN cluster after upgrading a couple of ESXi hosts, that …
Virtual Machine BootTime property is not being populated
Ever so often you come around something that you haven’t seen before. Well this issue is one of those things. In our environments we use loads of metrics and properties that we gather from the vCenter Server and expose them to the customer in our own custom front-end portal. One …
HPE Gen10 Proliant “Status of other host hardware objects” error
Introduction Last week I encountered something after upgrading one of our environments. Since the updates we’ve been randomly getting errors on ESXi hosts that said “Status of other host hardware objects”. After troubleshooting a little bit it seemed this isn’t impacting production or is providing us any trouble at all. …