Remove legacy EAM baseline in vLCM

Recently I upgraded a vSphere 7 environment to version 8. This left me with a vCLM baseline which was no longer applicable to any of the ESXi hosts. However I could not delete it. The option to detach the baseline from the cluster was grayed out. The baseline itself shows it was intended to install a host extension for NSX-V. And the option to remove the baseline entirely is also grayed out. This post describes the underlying issue and how to resolve it.

Analyze ESXi network captures remotely using Wireshark

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.

Fast packet interpretation on ESXi using pktcap-uw and pipes – updated

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.

Test API calls with Beeceptor

Lately I’ve been interacting a lot with REST APIs. I found that testing an API from within an application can sometimes cause some issues. For instance, when setting up a webhook notification instance using vROPS you only have a simple test button. But what if the application you want to access requires authentication and all you want to test is if you are able to access a URL via a HTTP proxy server?