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 [...]
While deploying a vCenter Operations Manager appliance a few days back, I was hit by the following error message (towards the end of its deployment): Failed to deploy OVF package: The task was canceled by a user. That was of course surprising given I didn't cancel the task. Thinking it might be a glitch, I [...]
Recently, after an upgrade to my vCenter machine, I was left with a situation where a couple of things broke in vCenter Orchestrator. One of those was a broken password, forcing me to reset the password back to the default. The other was some corruption somewhere, ending up displaying the following error when I clicked [...]
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 [...]
I always wondered why there is no book that specifically focusses on VMware networking, given its importance when it comes to deployment and maintenance of a stable virtual platform. No need for me to think that any more as "Networking for VMware Administrators" by Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl) and Steve Pantol (@StevePantol) is available for purchase [...]
Security is a subject that has historically been overlooked by companies/vendors when it comes to deployment of new systems. Generally, an easy and quick way out is preferred, especially when there are time-pressures to deliver a project or solution. That situation is exacerbated due to the fact that techies don't generally give security much thought [...]
We all know that Network I/O Control is your friend when it comes to production deployments of vSphere in general. Today, I quickly wanted to make a point that NIOC is also great when it comes to home labs and why we should have it enabled, if possible. A few days back, I was deploying [...]
Recently, I was building a nested ESXi environment in my lab, based on vSphere 5.5. Regular readers will remember that I generally use VMware Workstation (version 10, in this case) to run my virtual environment. I usually have my ESXi hosts configured with 8 NICs, which is pretty handy when I have to play with [...]
These days, I am working on a project involving VMware Capacity Planner. Part of its deployment means that one has to troubleshoot access issues, in order to get successful inventory and performance scans. I am planning to write a couple of posts to document tips that one generally doesn't find in documentation. In the meantime, [...]