Daniel

Knoxville, TN

VMware vSphere 6.0 available for download!!

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The wait is over!!! VMware vSphere 6, vSOM 6, vCloud Suite 6, SRM 6, and VSAN 6 are available for your downloading pleasure!! VMware has a notice message referencing KB2110293 with some scenario upgrade paths to get you started: HP already has their customized ESXi 6 image available, however at the time of posting this Dell hasn’t released their version. Watch for vSphere 6.0 documentation coming up right here in virtuallyBoring.com 🙂 Additional Reading: – What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.0? – VMware Announced vSphere 6!!!

VMUG Advantage Subscription – VMware License Keys for your Lab

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New to this years 2015 VMUG Advantage subscription is an addition called EVALExperience . It gives subscribers 365 day license keys for the majority of VMware products. It is perfect for running these solutions in your home lab without a 90 day trial period. EVALExperience is on top of the discounts you receive as a VMUG Advantage member. Current pricing is $200 a year. Check it out! Here are the products you get keys for: VMware vCenter Server Standard for vSphere 6 VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus VMware vCloud Suite® Standard VMware vRealize™ Operations Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations™ VMware vRealize Log Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon® VMware Horizon® Advanced Edition VMware Virtual SAN™ VMware Virtual SAN™All Flash Add On Here is what the portal looks like, this is where you download media and keys:   Edit 6/8/2015: Updated product list above. Additional Reading: VMUG Advantage Discounts and Perks: http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=6238

Not able to see the SD Card on HP Gen 9 during ESXi 5.5 Installation

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When trying to install HP ESXi 5.5 customized image on a HP Gen 9 BL460 blade server I was not able to see the SD card to install on. After trying a few things I found that switching the USB 3.0 mode to Auto instead of the defaulted On allowed ESXi installation to see the SD card. The internal card reader goes over the USB bus so this appears to be a bug and hopefully HP will have a update soon to fix it. Below is what I did to get through this issue: ESXi 5.5U2 Installation – If your not seeing the SD card, go ahead and reboot: Hit F9 on the boot screen to enter System Utilities: Hit Enter on the System Configuration: Hit Enter on the BIOS/Platform Configuration: Hit Enter on System Options: Hit Enter on USB Options: On USB 3.0 Mode, change the default value of Enabled to Auto. Now hit F10 to save and reboot. Now on ESXi installer screen you should see the SD card:

Disable ‘SSH for the host has been enabled’ message in vSphere 5

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I always forget where to turn off the SSH for the host has been enabled warning message so i’m posting it here for safe keeping. 🙂 To turn this message off click on the host, go to the Configuration tab, then click on Advanced Settings. Scroll down to the UserVars section. The last field is called UserVars.SupressShellWarning, change the value from a 0 to a 1. The message will now be gone! Resources: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2003637

Citrix PVS – Use VMware Workstation to Upgrade VMTools

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If you are running Citrix PVS in a VMware vSphere environment you know what a headache it is to update VMtools on your image. Citrix uses the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format for its vDisk and sadly VMware doesn’t like VHD’s. Instead of using Citrix XenConvert or StarWind V2V Converter, VMware Workstation should make this process much easier for you! VMware Workstation started supporting the VHD format with version 10 and makes upgrading VMtools a pretty simple task.   I will be using VMware Workstation 11 and will show you how to open your PVS VHD image and update tools without the need to reverse image it. Citrix VHD Preparation: First you need to merge your vDisk versions to a single base. In the Provisioning Service Console under vDisk Pool, right click the name of your vDisk and click Versions. Click the newest version of your vDisk and click Merge. You want to create a new Merged Base and make this Maintenance so not to interfere with your current environment. Click Ok. This can take quite a while if you haven’t made a merged base in a while. Once complete you will have a new merged base version. Click Done. Now browse to your Citrix vDisk directory and copy the VHD file created above to your desktop, this will be the file we work with in VMware Workstation. VMware Workstation: It is time …

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VMware announces vSphere 6!!!

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Today VMware announced vSphere 6 and will be accompanied with other releases such as vCloud Suite 6, Virtual SAN 6, and vSphere with Operations Manager. vSphere 6 has over 650 new features and innovations which makes this quite a release. There are many new amazing features to talk about so i’ll start easy with some of the key features with links for additional reading. Expect lots of vSphere 6 write ups in the near future 🙂 vSphere 6 –  New Maximums: Few of my Favorite Features: Infrastructure Controller (IC): Service that will provide the following functions: Licensing Certificate Store Certificate Authority Service Registration Single Sign-On Enchanted Web Client: Faster web client vs vSphere 5 (still isn’t HTML5) vMotion Improvements: Long Distance vMotion: Increased network latency tolerance from 10 ms to 100 ms vMotion across vCenters: vMotion across data center and vCenter boundaries that vSphere 5 had. vMotion across virtual switches: Basically enables the above, can vMotion across Virtual Standard Switch (vSS) and  Virtual Distributed Switches (vDSs). Fault Tollerance: Now supports 4 vCPUs, up from 1 vCPU. vVols (Virtual Volumes): New storage feature that allows virtual machines to interact with the storage directly without the need of VMFS LUNs. Content Library: Centralized management for VM templates, virtual appliances, ISO images, and scripts. (Wooooot!!!!) vCenter Appliance: Now has the same scalability numbers as the Windows installed vCenter: 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. Also supports linked mode!! (Post …

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StarWind Virtual SAN: A Storage Solution for your virtual environment

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One important thing you need for your virtual environment is storage. If you have a single ESXi host then using local storage is just fine but if you have multiple hosts and want to use features such as vMotion, High Availability (HA) , and DRS you need shared storage. In my quest to find a storage solution I started out using my Synology DS411slim. It works fantastically but I am very limited with speed and drive size due to the 2.5″ drive limitation. With the cost very high for a new Synology unit it left me seeking an alternative solution, that is where StarWind Virtual SAN steps in. StarWind Virtual SAN presents a servers local storage as a iSCSI LUN and even performs VMware VAAI functions. There is a free edition StarWind offers that is perfect for home labs, test and dev environments. You can download and receive your license key here: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free Prerequisites: At a minimum all you need is some local storage and a network connection as you will be presenting it out as iSCSI. Luckily I have a Dell PowerEdge R520 that will become my virtual SAN server. For better performance, you should have storage running on a RAID (5,10, etc) and multiple network connection that will be dedicated for iSCSI traffic. I have eight 300GB 10k SAS drives using RAID 5, I carved 300GB for my boot drive which left …

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VMware – Don’t Miss Event – February 2nd

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VMware announced an online event “that should not be missed” scheduled on February 2nd. There are many rumors floating around the net but I personally feel vSphere 6.0 will be announced.  Excited to see what is announced!! Register Here! This event is so BIG that we’re offering broadcasts around the globe the entire week of February 2…and continuing the excitement throughout February. All event registrants will automatically receive access to additional content, engagement, and activities via our online event platform. Event Times: AMERICAS Date: February 2, 2015 Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST / 4:00 – 5:00 PM EST EMEA Date: February 3, 2015 Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM GMT / 10:00 – 11:00 AM CET ASIA PACIFIC – ASEAN, Western Australia, Hong Kong Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM SGT ASIA PACIFIC – Sydney, Australia Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM AEDT ASIA PACIFIC – Mumbai, India Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:30 – 11:30 AM IST

Guest customization runs on every boot

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In our vSphere 5.1 update 2 environment we found that some of our Windows virtual machines were running guest customization every time they boot. This was causing them to loose their static IP address and take an additional 5 minutes to boot. To fix this issue, boot to Windows and open regedit. Navigate to to the following location: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ Edit the BootExecute key and remove all sysprepDecrypter.exe lines. We had some VMs with up to 10 entries! Your key should now look like this: Click OK. Now the VM will not perform the guest customization on every boot. To prevent future VMs you deploy from gaining this issue update your vSphere environment to at least 5.1 Update 5.

Authorize Exception Error when logging into vCenter

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If you get the following error when logging into vCenter(5.1U5): “A general system error occurred: Authorize Exception”   Restarting the Single Sign On service on your vCenter should resolve the issue. In my case the cause of this was due to the LDAP connection pool being exhausted. To confirm this check the ssoAdminServer.log found here: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\SSOServer\log Do a search for the following error: No ManagedConnections available within configured blocking timeout If you find that around the time when you was logging in then your LDAP connection pool was exhausted. This issue is resolved in vSphere 5.5. The VMware KB article for this issue 2055448: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2055448