When adding an ESXi host to a cluster, you might see this error: A general system error occured: Unable to get signed certificate for host <your host>. Error: Start Time Error (70034). You are more likely to see this in a lab environment but may also see it in production, if you have just generated [...]
Whenever a new vSphere version comes out, I upgrade at least one of my clusters to it but when I get a chance, also install a new fresh one. So, the time has come for me to build a fresh vSphere 6 cluster. Normally, I just do an install with all the standard things done [...]
Just thought I should do a quick post about a command that is extremely useful but often forgotten and that command is "watch". Syntax of this command is: watch [-n SEC] [-t] PROG ARGS where "n" is the interval in seconds (2 by default). This command is used as a wrapper, to constantly update results from [...]
A few months ago, I was helping out a customer with a time configuration issue on their vSphere environment. For one specific question, I investigated and wrote the post: ESXi Time Configuration: Don’t point it towards the Windows Domain name However, while doing the investigations, I went through various documents produced by VMware. As NTP [...]
Time for a book review. This book was released in November last year so I know it's a bit late but I've just got my hands on it. I hope you won't mind. It is written by Mike Greer and is just over 300 pages long, divided into 13 chapters. It starts with a brief [...]
A few days back, Corey Romero asked me if I am interested in co-hosting a CrowdChat session on vSphere. Having never been on CrowdChat, jumping from nothing to co-hosting seemed a bit intimidating but I've always liked a challenge so I said yes. Plus, this was another something that I could do for this amazing community easily [...]
Chances are that unless you are an organisation new to vSphere or want an installation in the lab, you will be upgrading your existing vSphere infrastructure to the new vSphere 6.0 at some point in the future. As there are some design changes in this version, there are decision points that must be considered before [...]
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 [...]
Recently, I upgraded one of my vSphere environments from vSphere 5.5 GA to 5.5 Update 1b. It all went smoothly and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Well, except for when I tried to use vCenter Orchestrator. The service was down and trying to start it, didn't work. It was as if it was in [...]
Recently, I had to shut down my lab environment for maintenance. While bringing the whole environment back up, my vC Ops (vCenter Operations Manager) appliance failed to start and threw up the following error: Cannot initialize property 'vami.netmask0.VM_1'. Network 'VM Network' has no associated network protocol profile Now, it's well-documented that this error will show [...]