Recently, VMware has been investing an enormous amount of effort into bringing vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) up to the same functionality as its Windows counterpart. vSphere 6.5 not only achieves that goal but also goes beyond it. In this article, I will explain what's new in VCSA and why its time now to exclusively deploy VCSA [...]
Recently, I thought I should patch one of my vSphere clusters using VMware Update Manager so I started to do a "Scan" for the cluster. However, the process failed soon after starting. The first thing I noticed was that the "VMware vSphere Update Manager" service was going down with it. VMware vSphere Update Manager had an [...]
Immediately after installing vSphere Update Manager 6 Update 1 (from the vCenter for Windows ISO), I went into the Web Client to do initial configuration. However, when I went into "Download Settings", there were no default download sources listed. That was strange but when I clicked the "Edit..." button (to see what the problem might be), [...]
While adding a couple of datastores to a newly-built vSphere 6 cluster recently, the following error message came up: All shared datastores failed on the host <hostname> Everything seemed normal and I hadn't done anything different. Plus, the datastores were actually visible and operational so it seemed like a false positive. I did a couple [...]
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 [...]
A quick one this! Not strictly a vRealize Automation issue but..... Recently, I was creating some vRealize Automation blueprints for a customer and a couple of RedHat blueprints starting throwing up this error during the customisation phase: Customization of the guest operating system 'rhel5_64Guest' is not supported in this configuration. Microsoft Vista (TM) and Linux [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We all know the pains that vSphere Certificate management presents us with. While VMware's Certificate Administration tool has made life a bit simpler, it is still quite a chore to generate requests, get the certificates (in the right format) and installing it in the right order. It was also quite a bit of work to [...]
The vSphere development team has done a great job in maintaining the same look and feel when it comes to interface of the new vSphere 6.0. Of course, there are minor changes due to new features but if you've been using previous versions of vSphere, you'll have no trouble navigating through the new version. However, don't [...]