ESXi
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.
ESXi
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 Read more…
ESXi
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 Read more…
Troubleshooting
How to fix VCD 10.2.2 not starting anymore after reboot
Introduction It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog. We’ve been extremely busy on our day to day jobs, but that does not mean that we are losing focus or that we don’t have anything to write about! Today I got another great quick blog for you guys surrounding Read more…
PowerCLI
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 Read more…
ESXi
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. Name PCI Device Driver Admin Status Link Status Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description —— ———— ——– ———— ———– —– Read more…
ESXi
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 Read more…
VMware
Building a homelab in 2020 – Part 1
The coming months I’ll be focussing a lot on education and certification and for this purpose having access to a lab environment is crucial. Now, I used to have the luxury of having a couple of blade servers at work that I could use for this but as I switched Read more…
vCenter
Introducing VMware vSphere and vSAN 7 Update 1 and VCF 4.1
Introduction In todays big webcast VMware made some interesting announcements for all VMware vSphere, vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) enthusiasts. I’ve been working with most new additions for a couple of weeks now and today the next major update in the vSphere portfolio was publicly announced with VMware vSphere Read more…
ESXi
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 Read more…