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 [...]
Recently, we ran into a problem which saw "VMware VirtualCenter Service" on one of our vCenter servers crashing after every restart. In my last post here, I documented the whole incident and its solution. If you read the post, you'll see that I had to delete a considerable number of accumulated snapshots from the affected VM [...]
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 [...]
These days, I am playing with VMware View 4.0.1. This is because a customer wants it "gradually" deployed within the company - so we have some time to do it. However, it's always nice to have a bash in your development environment before going full-blown into testing. I did that and the first thing I discovered was that [...]
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 [...]
In Part II of this article, we went through the process of upgrading a VirtualCenter 2.5 server to vCenter 4. In this third and final part, we'll talk about upgrading the hosts to ESX 4 and wrap up the upgrade process. Let's get to it then: ESX Host upgrades: First of all, make sure IP and networking configuration [...]
In Part I of this article, we started with some points one should think about while preparing for the upgrade of a Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 environment to vSphere 4. In this part, we'll go through the process of upgrading the VirtualCenter server to vCenter 4 Update 1. vCenter Install: Create a VM for the new vCenter server. Suggested spec (varies according to requirements): 2048 MB [...]
These days, I am upgrading our VI 3.5 environment to vSphere 4. Good thing is that there is a lot of information available in form of books and articles on the web for the different scenarios in which you can upgrade. Two of my favourite books on the subject are: Mastering VMware VSphere 4 by Scott Lowe VMware vSphere [...]
Every now and then, there comes a time when you have to change the "root" password on an ESX host. It might be because someone has left the company or could simply be an event when a problem required the root password to be revealed to people other than the "gods". One of the common misconceptions [...]