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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Recently, I built a new machine for my lab (for those interested in the story, here are Parts I, II and III). I put a 512GB SSD in the new machine with the aim to thin-provision all virtual machines but still get good performance, due to the high number of IOPS/read/write you get from SSDs. Once [...]
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. [...]
I know - you must be thinking why would anyone want to upgrade a vSphere 4.0 environment to 4.1 when version 5.0 is out now. Well, I can think of a couple of reasons why one might think of doing that. One is the fact that many organisations are still not ready to move to version [...]
For those of you who follow VMware products closely, the past couple of weeks have been quite interesting. VMware has announced vSphere 5.0 which has a lot of new exciting features and as always, bigger limits for resources that people are unlikely to hit... ever! However, it is unfortunate that this version of vSphere is making headlines [...]
A few days back, we were hit by a problem on one of our vCenter servers (vCenter 4.0 Update 1) in that the "VMware VirtualCenter Server" service starting failing. The message in "System" event log was "The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this n time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 300000 milliseconds: Restart [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]