16 12, 2014

ESXi Time Configuration: Don’t point it towards the Windows Domain name

By |2016-12-11T15:25:02+00:00December 16th, 2014|ESX, vCenter, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|2 Comments

A client asked me what happens if ESXi servers are pointed towards the Windows domain name in “Time Configuration” and one or more domain controllers are not contactable. While I had a theory, I realised I have never tested what actually happens and what is the failure process. I have seen many environments where using [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

30 09, 2012

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

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00September 30th, 2012|ESX, Virtual Lab, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere, Workstation|8 Comments

I've had my virtual infrastructure labs in their various incarnations for more than a decade now and the most recent one is based around a "whitebox" Dual-Quad core Xeon server, with 24 GB RAM.  This system was built in 2007 so the processors (while the best in their time) have become a bit of a limitation now. [...]

31 05, 2012

Upgrading VMware View 5.0.x to 5.1 (Part II)

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00May 31st, 2012|vCenter, VDI, View, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|0 Comments

In the first part of this post, I detailed the notes that I took while upgrading my VMware View 5.0.1 environment to 5.1.  I also mentioned some of the preparations that one should make before carrying out the upgrade.  In this post, I'll write about the rest of the upgrade process that I followed and also mention [...]

30 05, 2012

Upgrading VMware View 5.0.x to 5.1 (Part I)

By |2016-12-11T15:25:07+00:00May 30th, 2012|vCenter, VDI, View, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere|1 Comment

If you are interested in VMware View, you might have noticed that version 5.1 came out recently.  You might also know that it contains some eagerly awaited enhancements like View Storage Accelerator, Improved Persona Management options and ability to have a standalone View Composer machine, amongst other things.  For those reasons, I thought I should [...]

31 08, 2010

How to upgrade VMware Tools automatically? Tips and Myths

By |2010-08-31T22:00:03+01:00August 31st, 2010|ESX, vCenter, Virtualization, vSphere|8 Comments

The first thing one wants to do after upgrading the environment to a newer ESX version, is to upgrade VMware tools on all VMs.  If the environment has a large number of machines, this could be a tedious and time-consuming process.  This is where the ability to upgrade a bunch of machines automatically comes in very [...]

24 05, 2010

“Device ‘USB’ is not supported” after vSphere 4 upgrade

By |2010-05-24T22:06:04+01:00May 24th, 2010|ESX, Virtualization, vSphere|0 Comments

If you had a VM with a USB device attached, which was imported into ESX using some sort of conversion tool e.g. VMware Converter in the past, you may find that it refuses to boot after upgrade to vSphere 4.  Possible symptoms include: An error saying something similar to "Device 'USB' is not supported", asking it to [...]

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