PowerCLI: backup and restore an array of ESXi hosts

May 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

The following script makes a backup of the ESXi Host configuration file for an Array of Hosts in a folder on your Management station in C:\BackupMeUp. If you run the backup task multiple times, it will overwrite the saved configuration files for the hosts it already contains a configuration file for. Backup an Array of ESXi hosts Write-Host “Backing up ESXi config to C:\BackupMeUp” $vmhost_array = @(“esxi1.mydomain.com”) foreach ($vmhost in $vmhost_array) { Get-VMHostFirmware -VMHost $vmhost -BackupConfiguration -DestinationPath C:\BackupMeUp } Write-Host “Backup is completed!” The following script restores the host configuration from the folder on your Management station C:\BackupMeUp for an Array of Hosts. Make sure that you know which hosts it will restore, and that you modify this in the […]

VSAN 6.0 On-Disk v2 Calculator

May 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

It has taken me some days to create this tool and I sincerely hope you can use it in preparation of your VCAP6-DCV Design exam. It might not look pretty, but it works and compared with calculating VSAN sizing by hand, the spreadsheet will save you lots of time. So feel free to use it and if you have any remarks or questions, feel free to reach out. Take me to the VSAN 6.0 On-Disk v2 Calculator!

VCAP5 Exam Retirements Suspended

May 14, 2016 vReid 0

Since we announced the retirement of the remaining VCAP5 exams in late March, we have heard from quite a number of you who have requested additional time to prepare for and take those exams. Additionally, we are still working on the development and refinement of the VCAP6 exams (which will replace VCAP5), so these new exams have not yet been released in production. In light of your requests and still-pending VCAP6 exam releases, we are suspending the retirement of the following exams: VCAP5 Design Exams: VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 — Data Center Design (VCAP5-DCD) Exam #VDCD550 VCAP Lab Exams: VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 — Data Center Administration (VCAP5-DCA) Exam #VDCA550 VMware Certified Implementation Expert — Network Virtualization (VCIX-NV) Exam […]

RDMs and Microsoft Failover clusters

May 13, 2016 vReid 0

Unfortunately we have large number of virtual Microsoft failover cluster with RDM’s in virtual compatibility mode. Moving to SQL Always On is too expensive and our application owners refuse to acknowledge HA as an alternative. The issue with adding RDM’s is when you need to reboot an ESXi host it rescans for all these devices. As the amount of RDM’s increases this rescanning process can take up to an hr… Obviously waiting an hr is not acceptable so VMware created the following KB article to perennially reserve these devices. The issue I’ve experienced is when you have 100’s of RDM’s across 30-40 ESXi hosts, gathering all the devices using “esxcli storage core device list” and creating a script can be […]

UCS Central Pool Usage

May 12, 2016 vReid 0

I am luckily enough to work in a large environment with multiple UCS domains. However, managing multiple domains (nearly 9 in my case) can be challenging when you have 9 sets of different WWNN / WWPN , IP, UUID and MAC address  pools to manage. Cisco provide UCS Central which allows centralised management of all these domains. Something I came across in UCS manager is I could select a pool and view which service profiles were assigned to the pool values. However, in UCS Central this functionality appears to have disappeared… Instead of listing the service profile a particular value is assigned to (in this case the WWPN) you simply get “assigned-to-single”. I am not sure why this functionality was […]

VMware Application Dependencies and Entity Relationship Diagrams MK2

May 11, 2016 Don Ward 0

From vBikerBlog.com OK ladies and gentleman it's been a while since my last post and that's primarily down to things like looking after babies and changing jobs. The reasons for the job change was primarily because I felt I needed to get more true enterprise experiences in order to achieve a true understanding of Enterprise Architecting. Most if not all of my work to date as been in the SMB spaces so therefore the amount of complexity hasn't really been relevant to the point where I felt it could justify me becoming a VCDX. Anyway moving on to the subject at hand. You may recall that previously I questioned VMware's stance on their concept and point of view when it comes to […]

Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32 ERROR

May 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had this wonderful error happen to me recently. I am in the process of migrating the Management IPs from one network to another on all the hosts in the environment. It is part of a bigger plan to migrate everything including the vCenter components to a new IP range ( I am not looking forward to that esp since this is a 5.1 environment!). I did that and updated DNS, flushed the DNS caches on my machine and on the PRTG probes etc. The host came back up fine, but when it rejoined vCenter it had this wonderful error message: Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disk/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0. As a result, host configuration changes will […]

Setting a persistant scratch location on a ESXi host

May 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I noticed one of the hosts had a warning saying that: So basically I did what this KB article said: VMware KB article I had a look at another host, and had a look at the Advanced Settings value for: ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation It showed a VMFS volumes /vmfs/volumes/UUID/Scratch folder for that host. So it showed me the UUID such as this: vmfs/volumes/51dda02d-fade5016-8a08-005056171889/HOSTNAME So it looked like there was a folder on this LUN every host! So since I am new to this environment I had to find a way to translate the UUID to the name of the actual SAN datastore being used. I did this by using the: esxcli storage filesystyem list | grep UUID This gave me the actual […]