vCenter 7 update 1c: Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion (XVM)

Posted on February 19, 2021

Migrating virtual machines across vCenter instances has been a thing for several years now but it wasn’t a straightforward process at first. After a while the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility fling was released in order to simplify the process and remove the need for enhanced linked mode. Advanced... [Read More]

vSphere 7 clustered VMDK - RDM-free WSFC !

Posted on February 10, 2021

Background The end of the raw device mapping tyrannie on Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) is nigh! If you managed virtual environments that contain Windows Clusters, you probably know that these are a different kind of beast compared to your usual virtual machines equipped with thick and thick virtual... [Read More]

Perennially reserved disks in the vSphere client UI

Posted on January 25, 2021

In 2018 I wrote a blog for Vembu about how LUNs used as RDMs by Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) can significantly slow down the boot time of your vSphere hosts. This is due to the active node of the Windows cluster holding a lock on the LUN and... [Read More]

vSphere 7.0 and the memory greed

Posted on November 18, 2020

As I was fooling around with esxcli in my lab I decided to upgrade a 6.7u3 host to 7.0u1. Note that it is a simple vSphere host in workstation to which I allocated a mere 4GB of RAM because I only needed the minimum. I connected the ISO > upgraded... [Read More]

Enabling LDAPS on vCenter identity source

Posted on May 7, 2020

Most environments used to use the Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) as an identity source for vCenter. However with Microsoft tightening the screw on LDAP signing and VMware deprecating IWA in versions 7 and above, many will have to bite the bullet and move to LDAPS. It’s not a big deal... [Read More]

Host randomly not responding but replies to ping

Posted on April 30, 2020

In the series of weird and annoying technical issues that I seem to be blessed with, today I bring you one that falls in the category I despise the most, random disconnects. TL,DR: Random ESXi disconnects after NIC replacement. The fix was to remove and recreate the management vmkernel (also... [Read More]

Change vmnic order on vSphere host

Posted on April 22, 2020

Changing the vmnic order is an unusual thing to do and you may rightfully wonder why one would want to do that. Heterogeneous enironments are fully supported but most vSphere administrators aim to have homogeneous hosts with the exact same config in their clusters to simplify operations and avoid human... [Read More]