…if you want to use snapshots Pop Quiz Q: What’s the maximum size VMDK you could create in vSphere 5.1 or earlier? A: Most people that have studied for VCP will know the maximum VMDK size is 2TB minus 512 bytes. If you create a disk in the GUI, it allows you to choose 2TB, but it’s smart enough to …

Pop Quiz Q: What’s the maximum number of disks per SCSI Controller? A: It depends.. On your VCP exam, you would have said 15. Correct. Although if you want to clone or snapshot and quiesce a VM, the maximum is 7 disks per SCSI controller. Each SCSI Controller can control 15 disks and the quiesced snapshots in Windows …

During an SRM (5.0) failover, a VM failed during the IP customisation failed at step 11. It was strange as we hadn’t seen this error in quite a while. 11. Power On Priority 3 VMs Error – Cannot complete customization, possibly due to a scripting runtime error or invalid script parameters (Error code: -1). IP settings …

The storage views tab in the vSphere client disappeared, and vCenter System Services displayed some of the following errors: unable to retrieve health data from https://localhost:443/vsm/health.xmlunable to retrieve health data from https://localhost:443/eam/eamService-web/health.xmlunable to retrieve health data from …

For those using Dell hardware, when you log the job with Dell Support, they’ll ask you to run a DSET report. This collects various information of the server including service tag, all hardware devices, firmware versions etc. There’s 3 ways to get DSET info. Install DSET locally Run DSET LiveCD Run DSET remotely and …

The Disappearing Act A VM went off the network, and actually lost the NIC from within the VM’s hardware. Pouring through logs, (some thanks to LogInsight, more on that later), I discovered in vmware-xx.log: 2013-11-19T07:33:01.246Z| vcpu-0| Powering off Ethernet0 2013-11-19T07:33:01.246Z| vcpu-0| Hot removal done. ah …

It’s amazing how much is going on when you dig through logs. On this occasion I was looking at “tasks & events” of a host and noticed a lot of network errors. Alarm ‘Network uplink redundancy lost’ on triggered an action The error was occurring every 5 minutes. This was made visual with the use of Log Insight. My …

By accident while in Cluster Settings / Datastore Heartbeating, I noticed a datastore wasn’t available of one of the hosts. Trying to mount it from the vSphere client failed with a popup: Call “HostStorageSystem.ResolveMultipleUnresolvedVmfsVolumes” for object “storageSystem-326” on vCenter Server “vcenter” failed. The …

While using Splunk I noticed 1 ESX host had a huge amount of logs compared with the others in that cluster. Looking into it, every hour there were about 23,000 entries for: 1storageRM: Slope info magic number check failed. On disk 0x0, expected 0x1df5e76. There was only 1 hit on google from a twitter conversation with …