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 [...]
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 [...]
This post is about a very useful one-liner I use often and one that has saved me a lot of headache in the past. I tweeted about this one earlier in the year as well but thought this one actually deserves a blog post so that it's not lost in the large space that is [...]
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, 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 [...]
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 [...]