27 01, 2014

Missing vmnics from ESXi after installation

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00January 27th, 2014|ESX, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|0 Comments

Recently, I was building a nested ESXi environment in my lab, based on vSphere 5.5. Regular readers will remember that I generally use VMware Workstation (version 10, in this case) to run my virtual environment.  I usually have my ESXi hosts configured with 8 NICs, which is pretty handy when I have to play with [...]

30 09, 2013

How to create shared iSCSI storage for ESXi using StarWind’s iSCSI SAN Software

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00September 30th, 2013|Cloud, ESX, How To, SRM, StarWind, vCenter, VDI, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|3 Comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab.  In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup.  Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]

12 08, 2013

StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN: Shared Storage for my VMware Workstation Powered Lab

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00August 12th, 2013|ESX, Review, StarWind, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|1 Comment

Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions.  One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite.  In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]

29 07, 2013

VMware Update Manager Plugin Error: Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 29th, 2013|ESX, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, VUM|21 Comments

You might see an error, immediately after installation of VUM (VMware Update Manager) and after installing its plugin: There was an error connecting to VMware vSphere Update Manager - [Server Name:443].  Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems. Here is a screenshot for reference: VMware Update Manager - Plugin Error This generally happens [...]

22 07, 2013

How to Install vCenter 5.1 SSO (Single Sign On): Common Pitfalls and Remedies

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00July 22nd, 2013|Cloud, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|6 Comments

The time has come for me to rebuild my lab after a good few months so I've been trashing and rebuilding all over the place.  While building something, I blog about any issues hit but sometimes, there isn't enough time and you miss a post or two.  This blog post is to correct one of [...]

6 06, 2013

How to Recover Virtual Machines with Corrupt Snapshots

By |2016-12-11T15:25:06+00:00June 6th, 2013|Disaster Recovery, ESX, General, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization|0 Comments

There are times when a virtual machine might start rebooting or shut down completely, due to one or more snapshots for that machine getting corrupt.  Depending on the type of failure, recovery from such a situation is possible and at times, with all data intact.  For example, when a backup solution takes a snapshot as [...]

19 03, 2013

VMware Hybrid Cloud: “There was an error running your last operation….”

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00March 19th, 2013|Cloud, How To, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows|0 Comments

One of my colleagues is currently researching cloud services.  Like me, he is also very interested in VMware Hybrid Cloud and created an account as soon as it was made available.  However, despite using supported browsers, he ran into problems trying to delete a virtual machine that he had created earlier.  Every time he tried, [...]

16 03, 2013

Getting Started with VMware Hybrid Cloud

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00March 16th, 2013|Cloud, ESX, Firewall, How To, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Windows|0 Comments

In the past couple of years, the term "cloud services" has become very fashionable.  Every company wants to be on it.  So, even if your day-to-day job is not virtualization, it still makes sense to know about it.  Now, even though a cloud service is just a platform outside your own private environment, to someone [...]

28 01, 2013

Building (or Upgrading) a Virtual Home Lab Machine – Part III

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00January 28th, 2013|Hardware, vCenter, View, Virtual Lab, VMware, vSphere, Windows, Workstation|5 Comments

In the first and second posts of this series, I covered my thought process for deciding what hardware and software to use for my new lab machine and then what I actually bought and built, respectively.  In this last post of the series, I intend to cover some optimizations I did after the build, some [...]

31 10, 2012

Building (or Upgrading) a Virtual Home Lab Machine – Part II

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00October 31st, 2012|Hardware, Strategy, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Workstation|3 Comments

In my last post, I discussed the things that are important to me when I am considering to build a new machine for my lab and my reasons for choosing certain options when building a new one.  I promised to report on what I bought and built after making the decisions above and how it went, [...]

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