OVF and OVA formatted Virtual Appliances

The Open Virtual machine Format (OVF) originally came about in 2007 as the result of a proposal by vendors (VMware, HP, Dell and others) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF), the goal being to create an open standard for interchangeability (portability) of Virtual Machines between hypervisors. VMware was an early and enthusiastic adopter of
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Timekeeping on ESXi

Timekeeping on ESXi Hosts is a particularly important, yet often overlooked or misunderstood topic among vSphere Administrators. I recall a recent situation where I created an anti-affinity DRS rule (separate virtual machines) for a customer’s domain controllers. Although ESXi time was correctly configured, the firewall had been recently changed and no longer allowed NTP. As
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SSL3 GET RECORD

I was doing an in-place upgrade of a vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6 (Windows), when I encountered an unusual error, that didn’t seem to have a relevant KB article or much other information. This was most definitely NOT a database incompatibility, as was indicated by the second error. It turns out that the solution is
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