Category: VMware vSphere

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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SSL3 GET RECORD

I was doing an in-place upgrade of a vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6 (Windows), when I encountered an unusual error, that didn’t seem to have a relevant KB article or much other information. This was most definitely NOT a database incompatibility, as was indicated by the second error. It turns out that the solution is
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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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Backing up and restoring the vCenter Server Appliance 6 database

One extremely important advantage of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is its native PostgreSQL (vPostgres) database. With the embedded database and VCSA, it is now possible to support installations which scale to the maximum capability of vCenter, without additional Operating System or Database licensing costs. Incumbent with the use of VCSA, however, comes a
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