Ovftool can be pretty awesome, but it can also be very difficult to use. I seem to have a love/hate relationship with it.

Here I will go over some common issues I have with the tool. I've only tested on the Windows version of ovftool.

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With plenty of unfinished drafts growing, I thought I'd procrastinate even more by jumping on the static website bandwagon. I've migrated from Blogger to Hugo, and hosted on AWS with CloudFront. The process to migrate from Blogger to Hugo has been incredibly time consuming. Honestly I have no valid reason to change …

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A lot of people have probably never tried vRealize Business. As more companies want a cloud like charging model, or to show the true cost of VMs, interest in these tools is picking up. Usually vRB is deployed with vRA or vIDM, as it will use them as an authentication source. One of the great features of vRB7.2 is that …

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Larger environments tend to integrate their monitoring and ticketing systems. Some also add automated workflows based on alarms. The problem when setting up these workflows is how do you test the workflow is triggered based on specific alarms? With thanks to William Lam for the tips, it’s possible to trigger specific …

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I recently spent some time building kickstart files. Something I hadn’t done much since 2008. The most noticeable change in the process is I’m older and fatter. I re/learnt a few things, and did my first ever python script. First up, William Lam has plenty of articles on the topic, and the official vSphere installation …

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The list of 2016 vExperts was officially announced by VMware. This year sees a total of 1374 people awarded the title of vExpert. Australia / New Zealand represent 4.2% of the total vExpert numbers. This year the vExpert nomination form asked for your country, so lets hope VMware publish that info. So for now, this is …

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Using PowerCLI you can use Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy “RoundRobin” to set the PSP, but I found it quite slow using it on a large scale. It would update one datastore on one host every 5 seconds. If there were 10 ESXi hosts with 200 Datastores, that’s 2000 operations, at 5 seconds each, it adds up to 3 hours. The same …

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VMware announced the list of 2015 vExperts during the week. Congratulations to all that made it. The list now contains over 1,000 vExperts. For something perhaps a bit more relevant in the A/NZ region, I’ve broken it down for us. The numbers haven’t changed that much due to the 3 selection rounds of …

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…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 …

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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 …

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