A Treasure Trove of Technology Tidbits
Today, I was upgrading a vCenter 5.0 server to vCenter 5.1. The first part of the upgrade process is to install the new VMware Single Sign On (SSO) service on the existing vCenter server. This part of the installation can easily happen during production times, because it does not effect access to the existing vCenter […]
Normally, installing a virtual machine appliance is easy. Just download, deploy, answer a few basic questions, and the VMA is running. But, not today. Today, I went to install the newest SolarWinds VMA for Virtualization Management and promptly received the error “Cannot initialize property. ‘vamp.DNS0.SolarWindows_Virtualization_Manager’, since network has no associated IP pool configuration.” The first […]
Today, I installed another VMware vCenter server. This was not an unusual occurrence for me, as more and more companies are implementing server virtualization. But, today was unusual—the installation failed with the obscure error message of “Installation of VMware vCenter Server failed. Install VMware vCenter Server separately by using individual installer rather than WMware vCenter […]
So, VMware 5.0 has a new Consolidate menu item located in Inventory | Virtual Machine | Snapshot menu. What does it do? Before I get to that, let’s review what the other menu items do, because Consolidate only makes sense after you understand what can go wrong with snapshots. First, snapshots are a terrific feature. […]
I have posted how to start and stop the SSH shell from within the VMware console. But, there is another way of doing this same process, without using the console. The advantage of using the GUI is that you only need the appropriate iSphere client credentials and not the root password that you need to […]
So, last week, I needed some assistance from VMware support. I used the feature available in the Administration menu | Export System Logs menu item to generate support logs. But, I did so while focused upon a host server that does not have any local host storage. Guess what happened? Well, without local host storage, […]
VMware’s vCenter server has some build-in alarms and alerting functionality. But, sometimes, a production environment wants to integrate with an existing solution or use a more comprehensive solution that also alerts when problems happen with physical servers. In any case, you might need the new solution to query the VMware environment, which is best achieved […]
So, I am working on some HP 680c blades. They happen to be installed with four flex-10 modules in their blade chassis… which should result in 24 network cards per blade. But, something strange was happening because I could only see 13 network cards within VMware ESXi 5.0. While researching this problem, I came across […]
Several folks noticed that I used a third-party tool to attach an ISO image in a Windows virtual machine. Thought it might be valuable to comment upon the tool I was using. It is freeware and can be downloaded from this website: http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm Once installed, mount an ISO image: Right-Click the “MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD Manager” […]
As many of you are probably aware, VMware 5.0 Update 1 was released on March 15th, 2012. I have had an opportunity to patch my ESXi 5.0 hosts and update the vCenter Server. This blog post contains the steps used to update the vCenter Server. Before you begin, gather the credentials you will need in […]