Posts

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 ha! This shows Ethernet0 was removed via the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the Windows system tray. The solution is to add a new NIC of the same type.

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.

Do the following:

$webclient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$creds = Get-Credential
$webclient.Proxy.Credentials = $creds
update-help

This will connect to the internet and download the updated help files.

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 new favourite tool. I couldn’t find anything wrong with this particular ESXi host, vSwitch or uplink.

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. Bloggers are saying great things about the VCA exams. I spoke with a few people at vForum Sydney recently on the new certifications, and I’m glad I’m not the only one to have a different opinion on them.

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. I found an awesome ESXTOP poster at vmworld.net. No idea how I hadn’t come across this before. I’d never really used esxcli much. I’d cut & paste esxcfg/vicfg lines that I’ve been hanging on to, but these commands were mainly for ESX3/4.

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 5.5 – Greg Mulholland Building a Service Provider Cloud Offering – Arron Stebbing Coming off VMworld only 3 weeks before, we knew there was a lot of great info to pass on to the crowd, and there was a higher than average number of registrations.

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 command to force mount a snapshot that is persistent has changed from ESX(i)4.x to ESXi5.0. The details are at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011387. Use SSH or ESXi Shell and run:

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. It worked!  It appears to do the 20% off the ORIGINAL price of the exam.

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: storageRM: Slope infomagicnumbercheckfailed.Ondisk0x0, expected0x1df5e76. There was only 1 hit on google from a twitter conversation with @northlandboy & @blomjoh asking if anyone knew what the error was. I logged an SR for it. But magically the next day, the error stopped appearing in the logs.

The next Melbourne VMUG is on Wednesday 24th July. Veeam will be there doing live demos and talking about the upcoming release of v7 of Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam has to be the most popular (and coolest) backup application. VMware will be presenting vCAC – vCloud Automation Center. Going by the amount of submissions for VMworld on vCAC, this is going to be the next hottest thing VMware will be pushing.