A quick one this: After recovering from a hung VMware Workstation host, I was booting up the virtual machines and on one of them, I saw the following error: Failed to lock the file. Cannot open the disk <disk name> or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Module DiskEarly power on failed. Failed [...]
Recently, I was looking at an old post by William Lam did on Dash; an offline documentation browser which is very useful for holding offline copies of vSphere and other APIs. As automation of all things picks up momentum, there is every chance that sooner or later, you'll find the need to keep offline but updated [...]
Back in 2012, I joined Xtravirt. One of my colleagues was Darren Woollard (who works at Nutanix now). He knew that I had been blogging for a few years so while putting his vExpert application in, he asked me if I had ever applied for it. I didn't even know that mere mortals like me can become vExperts [...]
Last year, when I heard that Ravello Systems are offering free access to vExperts, I was amazed at the offer. https://twitter.com/AtherBeg/status/611730991963598849 Even though I have a fairly good sized lab in my study, there are many times when I want to play with some cool new technology but don't have the time or expertise to [...]
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 [...]
On one of my vRealize Automation engagements, I was asked by my customer to integrate their vRealize Automation environment with their externally-hosted ServiceNow implementation. Now, this was a typical distributed environment and Orchestrator was buried deep inside a subnet, along with other servers within the deployment. Obviously, the machines talked to each other fine but for [...]