Category: Operating Systems

OVF and OVA formatted Virtual Appliances

The Open Virtual machine Format (OVF) originally came about in 2007 as the result of a proposal by vendors (VMware, HP, Dell and others) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF), the goal being to create an open standard for interchangeability (portability) of Virtual Machines between hypervisors. VMware was an early and enthusiastic adopter of
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Timekeeping on ESXi

Timekeeping on ESXi Hosts is a particularly important, yet often overlooked or misunderstood topic among vSphere Administrators. I recall a recent situation where I created an anti-affinity DRS rule (separate virtual machines) for a customer’s domain controllers. Although ESXi time was correctly configured, the firewall had been recently changed and no longer allowed NTP. As
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Upgrading to VCSA 6 fails

I began an upgrade of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance from 5.5 to 6 for a small (in VMware’s own terminology ‘Tiny’) vSphere environment of 3 hosts and about 30 VMs. I certainly didn’t anticipate any trouble beyond the usual hassles associated with upgrading an infrastructure-level service like vCenter. Unfortunately, carefully following VMware documented procedures
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