Additional capabilities to manage Transparent Page Sharing
Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is the ability for virtual machines to share identical memory pages. This allows hosts to most efficiently use memory, particularly when those hosts have many almost identical virtual machines running on them. The net benefit is better memory usage, potentially leading…
VMware releases first ShellShock patch
A few hours ago, VMware released the first fix for the shellshock bug. The fix is for vCenter Log Insight 2.0. We expect patches for other products to be available soon. The list of products to patch is not the shortest one, there is a…
VMware and ShellShock bug – What it means for you
The internet is in a twist. A bug in BASH recently has been published. It’s called ShellShock, like the disorder soldiers suffered from in WW1. This bug has been there for a long time, but nobody knew. Apparently it’s the oldest bug known to date…
VMware Virtual SAN best practices
This morning at VMworld 2014 there was a great session regarding the most common mistakes/pitfalls in VMware Virtual SAN design. One of the speakers was Cormac Hogan, VMware Storage Architect. He had some great tips. Minimal cluster size is 4 nodes. According to the…
VMware Fling – Latency Sensitivity Troubleshooting Tool
VMware released a new Fling, a latency sensitivity troubleshooting tool. The Latency Sensitivity Troubleshooting Tool provides scripts and examples to troubleshoot configuration and performance problems with the Latency Sensitivity feature in VMware vSphere 5.5. Features Python script that runs on ESXi to check virtual machine…
Untangle the mess! Network issues with VMware VMs
In the last couple of weeks my colleagues and I encountered several issues with virtual machines in relation to network configurations. These issues where relatively easy to fix but I wanted to write them down for myself and share them with you all. Problems first arose when…
Resolved: VMware vSphere 5.5 Update 1 NFS disconnects
A new issue has been discovered with vSphere 5.5 Update 1 that is related to loss of connection of NFS based datastores. The result is an All Paths Down (APD) of the NFS datastores meaning that vSphere loses connection to the virtual machine files and/or the…
Network connection lost after vCSA restore
Today we encountered a strange error after restoring a vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) in our vCloud Director environment. You would expect that a restore of a virtual machine would return it to its original state at the time of the back-up. As it turns out…
No internet connection results in slow vSphere client consoles
In the last few weeks a customer that I am working for has been making a lot of changes within their infrastructure. Some big and some (on the surface) small. Somewhere during those weeks a change was made and the consequence of that change has…
Manually delete protected replicas in Horizon View
Two weeks ago Sander wrote an article on ‘How to link VMware View desktop to its replica‘. Unfortunately in my case my server died and because I had to reinstall my Horizon View environment. Because the View desktops were provisioned on another server and on…
Recovering from lost snapshot on RDM
A couple of weeks ago I had a problem where the connection between a snapshot and its parent disk was gone. The parent was a raw device mapping pointing to a LUN on a SAN. This all happened during a migration from one type of SAN…
vSphere network troubleshooting
During the last month I have been very busy building a new infrastructure at a client site. I’m responsible for the overall technical solution and the basis, a VMware vSphere infrastructure build on five Dell PowerEdge R805’s, Dell EqualLogic PS5000 and 6000 storage and Cisco…
vSphere 4 HA may not work with certain IP addresses
Filtering through my e-mail after a short, one week, holiday I ran into an e-mail from one of my colleagues pointing me to VMware KB Article 1013013. This KB article describes one of the first patches for vCenter Server 4. The problem is that High…
Troubleshooting VM network connections
When I am troubleshooting I like to have a list of items I can check for either in my head or on paper. Amongst the knowledge base articles of VMware, I found an article about troubleshooting VMs that are having network connection issues. The article…
ESXi bug when changing IP address
Yesterday I ran into VMware HA problems again. With my past HA troubleshooting experiences I thought configuring HA wouldn’t be a problem any more but unfortunately it bit me in the ass again. We all know VMware ESX implementations where not all information, access, etc…