Posts

Office Arguments – Maximum VMDK size is NOT 2TB-512bytes

…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.
Dec 23, 2014 3 min read Office Arguments, Snapshots, troubleshooting

Maximum Disks Per SCSI Controller is NOT 15

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.
Dec 22, 2014 3 min read Office Arguments, Snapshots, troubleshooting, vCenter

SRM – IP Customisation error

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).
Dec 19, 2014 1 min read Site Recovery Manager, SRM, troubleshooting

Web Client Sucks – Use VM Remote Console (VMRC)

Lets face it, there’s lots of things the web client sucks at. Using a console window in the browser is one of them. This bar at the top of the console window just takes up space.
Nov 12, 2014 2 min read vCenter

Learning Powershell – Beginner Steps

I had a lot of trouble getting into PowerCLI. I knew some of the basic commands, but I never used it to do anything productive. The biggest site I managed had 150 VM’s, and I could do most tasks quickly through the vSphere client.
Nov 2, 2014 2 min read certification, Pluralsight

Two weeks after XtremIO Gotcha

It’s been 2 weeks since I blogged about the XtremIO Gotcha, and the story has since been covered by many people and news services (See previous post for links). Chad Sakac quickly responded on his blog, and if you read through the comments, he says they’ll take care of customers:
Sep 28, 2014 2 min read storage, XtremIO

XtremIO Gotcha

17th Sept update:  I’ve been contacted directly by EMC, and they say they’ll work through this with us. Sounds promising. There’s been a lot of coverage on the topic.
Sep 14, 2014 9 min read vmworld, XtremIO

Before you go to VMworld

You’ve got flights & accommodation, VMworld ticket, and sessions picked. There’s a few more of the boring, but important tasks that you should take care of before you leave for VMworld.
Aug 9, 2014 3 min read vmworld

More Aussie vExperts / VCDX’s

Back in April, I did a post when VMware announced 754 vExperts for 2014. This week, 123 were named vExperts from the Q2 nominations. That adds another 2 Aussie vExperts to the list; Tim Williams (@ymmit85) and Matthew Healy (@matt232h).
Jul 12, 2014 13 min read community, vExpert, vmug

vSphere Client Storage Views tab not showing any infomation

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.
Jun 4, 2014 2 min read ESXi5.0, OfficeScan, TrendMicro, troubleshooting, vCenter

Is Host Isolation Response set right for you?

Coming in to manage a virtual environment that’s already up and running, you guess it’s set up correctly for the most part. As time goes on, you may pick up a few things here and there to improve it.
Jun 1, 2014 3 min read ESXi, HA

Running Dell DSET remotely on ESXi

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.
May 25, 2014 3 min read dell, dset, ESXi, OpenManage, troubleshooting

Installing Dell OpenManage on ESXi

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) provides detailed information about the hardware. Handy to find out details of the physical drives, memory sticks and if there’s any failed components. If you log a support call with Dell, chances are they will ask for more details, and possibly a DSET report, and having OMSA already installed, makes life easier.
May 24, 2014 2 min read dell, dset, ESXi, OpenManage

Melbourne VMUG May 2014 Wrap up

Last week we had the quarterly VMUG meeting at the Telstra Conference Centre. We paid homage to the creator of the VMware community, John Troyer, as he’s moved on from VMware after 9 years.
May 22, 2014 3 min read community, storage, vExpert, vmug

Congrats Aussie vExperts

Congratulations to all the vExperts from Australia, New Zealand & Singapore. It’s an honour to be included with such great local talent. Back in 2010, Greg Mulholland was the only vExpert that I actually knew in Australia.
Apr 6, 2014 12 min read vExpert, vForum, vmug, vmworld

vBeers – Thursday 3rd April

Virtualisation is thirsty work Because there’s never enough time at the Melbourne VMUG to catchup with members, we’re having an in-between VMUG vBeers at Trunktown. If you can’t wait for the next VMUG, this should keep you going for another 6 weeks until the next Melbourne VMUG, on 15th May, 2014.
Mar 30, 2014 1 min read community, vmug

Top vBlogs 2014 A/NZ

You’re all winners Eric Siebert announced the results of the top virtualisation blogs the other day and it was great to see the local Australia/New Zealand guys score well. These bloggers really are “community guys”.
Mar 29, 2014 2 min read community

2014 Melbourne VMUG User Conference Wrap up

Record attendance Wow, we had 374 attendees at the Melbourne VMUG User Conference. The awesome turnout to this and other Melbourne VMUG events show’s we’re the premiere VMUG is the region.
Mar 3, 2014 2 min read vmug

2014 Melbourne VMUG User Conference

It’s on again! This years Melbourne VMUG User Conference is coming up next month on Tuesday 4th February at Hilton on the Park. This will be the third User Conference Melbourne has done.
Jan 30, 2014 3 min read vmug

vForum Sydney Wrap Up

Last year I went to vForum in Sydney (October 2013). This is the premier virtualisation event in the ANZ region. Lost in Translation I called the hotel the day before to confirm the reservation of a room with 2 singles.
Jan 19, 2014 4 min read vForum, vmug

Look after yourself and your data

A long time ago in a galaxy far away.. Looking back at my younger days of IT, I had plenty of time and disposable income. I spent plenty of all-nighters installing and breaking linux distros and various other toys, and when it did break, it took many hours of troubleshooting or eventually re-installing and re-configuring again.
Jan 5, 2014 5 min read backup, crashplan, lastpass, security

Missing VM NIC

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.
Nov 29, 2013 2 min read LogInsight, troubleshooting

Updating powershell help

When installing Powershell v3, it doesn’t install any local help files for get-help. If you are upgrading from v2 to v3, the help isn’t updated either. If you are using a proxy, a simple update-help may not work for you.
Nov 15, 2013 1 min read powershell

Constant Alarm ‘Network Uplink Redundancy Lost’

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.
Nov 12, 2013 2 min read ESXi, troubleshooting, vCenter

VCA Exams Worthless?

VMware released the VMware Certified Associate (VCA) exams at VMworld San Francisco 2013. These are entry level exams, below VCP, aimed at people just getting into virtualisation or not quite ready to sit the VCP exams.
Oct 28, 2013 2 min read certification

My VCAP-DCA experience

Everyone else has done one, so I hope there’s something unique that comes out of this. The Study I made some notes as I was studying for VCAP-DCA, so these may not necessarily reflect what was on the exam.
Oct 9, 2013 5 min read certification, ESXi5.0

2013 September Melbourne VMUG

The September Melbourne VMUG was on this week, and it was a ripper. The agenda was set for: EMC Presentation: Continuous Availability with VPLEX – Berin Smithson VMware Presentation: What’s New in vSphere 5.
Sep 23, 2013 3 min read vmug, vmworld

Force mount missing datastores

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:
Aug 21, 2013 1 min read ESXi5.0, troubleshooting, vCenter

Sit the IaaS exam for US$11

After reading the #vBrownBag IaaS study guide from @coolsport00, and exams being 75% off at VMworld, I decided to book the IaaS exam. The exam is usually US$225. I booked it using the VMworld SF 75% discount code, and thought I’d be cheeky and try and apply the VMUG Advantage 20% discount as well.
Jul 27, 2013 1 min read certification, vmworld

Slope info magic number check failed

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:
Jul 19, 2013 2 min read splunk, troubleshooting