VMware ESXi is the Type 1 “Bare Metal” Hypervisor offered for free as “The VMware Hypervisor” or as part of the vSphere platform under a wide variety of licensing arrangements.
On upgrading a cluster running on HPE Blades to vSphere 7, I had a vSAN Hardware Compatibility Warning that the Controller Driver was not VMware Certified. I had been very careful with the HCL before upgrading and I was certain that all hardware components were compatible. Turns out that I had simply gone too far
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Before the power goes out If you know that you are going to lose power (as is the case when mains power has failed and you are running on UPS power) it’s always a good idea to begin to shut your VMs down, beginning with transactional VMs such as databases. Remember, if you shut it
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Recently I was configuring a customer’s IaaS VMware Cloud and one of the first things I noticed were some inconsistencies in the Port Group configuration across the 6 ESXi Hosts in the cluster. This is easy to see in vCenter, from the Networks view of Inventory and the Networks tab, simply compare the names of
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I have to confess that I have always thought of NFS for vSphere as being a second-tier choice. Even the best solutions from well known vendors using 10GbE and SSD, NFS datastores always seem to under-perform and be more problematic as compared to block-storage SAN devices. Even with the theoretical reduction of overhead per payload
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In an ideal world, management would provide unlimited funding to upgrade hardware continuously! We all know that’s not going to happen! Sometimes it is necessary to prolong the lifespan of servers as long as possible, particularly when they are extremely well-provisioned devices, even by today’s standards! Such is the case with our HP BL460 G7
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I was designing a customer vSAN deployment and I came across the guidelines and formula for calculating the required ESXi Coredump partition size: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147881 Right away, I started working the formula for my customers deployment, when it occurred to me; this is WAY more complicated than it needs to be! VMware actually wants you to take
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For years, I have dismissed Virtual Machine Hardware version as unimportant. In fact, in this very blog, I may have advocated for leaving VM Hardware Version set at 8, to maintain full compatibility with both the vSphere C# Client and the vSphere Web Client. Unfortunately, thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, things have changed. Updating your
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Many people are under the incorrect belief that it is hardware-level firmware updates from companies like HPE and Dell that will protect our Virtual Machines from Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities. This is NOT TRUE. As far as your VMs are concerned, the VM BIOS and Hypervisor are the hardware! When VMware gets around to re-releasing vSphere
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I recently went looking for information on password security for the VCSA 6.0 & 6.5 and ESXi 6.0 & 6.5. Most specifically, I was interest in the number of passwords remembered, so I could define that in documentation for a client. Try as I might, I couldn’t find documentation for VCSA number of passwords remembered
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HPE has quietly withdrawn the HPE Custom Image for ESXi 6.5U1 July 2017 due to purple-screen issues being experienced on a number of current VMware-supported servers (http://vmware.com/go/hcl)! The particular issue purple screen we saw when deploying this ISO against a HP BL460 G7 was: #PF Exception 14 in world 6824:sfcb-smx IP 0x1 addr 0x1