In this post I have created a general-purpose Best Practices guideline for VMware vSphere, including references. I base these Best Practices recommendations on my personal, and VMsources collective experience, in dealing with hundreds (if not thousands, at this point) of unique client environments over the last decade. My intent is to help VMware users of
Read More »
On upgrading a cluster running on HPE Blades to vSphere 7, I had a vSAN Hardware Compatibility Warning that the Controller Driver was not VMware Certified. I had been very careful with the HCL before upgrading and I was certain that all hardware components were compatible. Turns out that I had simply gone too far
Read More »
Recently I was configuring a customer’s IaaS VMware Cloud and one of the first things I noticed were some inconsistencies in the Port Group configuration across the 6 ESXi Hosts in the cluster. This is easy to see in vCenter, from the Networks view of Inventory and the Networks tab, simply compare the names of
Read More »
I’ve been harping about this for years, but a couple of recent customer situations have emphasized the importance of correct time/NTP configuration for all of your vSphere components. In one situation, incorrect time configuration almost completely broke a Nutanix Storage cluster! There was no problem with Nutanix or VMware, but rather networking challenges prevented the
Read More »
In an ideal world, management would provide unlimited funding to upgrade hardware continuously! We all know that’s not going to happen! Sometimes it is necessary to prolong the lifespan of servers as long as possible, particularly when they are extremely well-provisioned devices, even by today’s standards! Such is the case with our HP BL460 G7
Read More »
Many people are under the incorrect belief that it is hardware-level firmware updates from companies like HPE and Dell that will protect our Virtual Machines from Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities. This is NOT TRUE. As far as your VMs are concerned, the VM BIOS and Hypervisor are the hardware! When VMware gets around to re-releasing vSphere
Read More »
I recently went looking for information on password security for the VCSA 6.0 & 6.5 and ESXi 6.0 & 6.5. Most specifically, I was interest in the number of passwords remembered, so I could define that in documentation for a client. Try as I might, I couldn’t find documentation for VCSA number of passwords remembered
Read More »
HPE has quietly withdrawn the HPE Custom Image for ESXi 6.5U1 July 2017 due to purple-screen issues being experienced on a number of current VMware-supported servers (http://vmware.com/go/hcl)! The particular issue purple screen we saw when deploying this ISO against a HP BL460 G7 was: #PF Exception 14 in world 6824:sfcb-smx IP 0x1 addr 0x1
I thought I would revisit scripted ESXi installation for my lab. It’s been since 5.0 or prior since I actually went into depth on this and there are some significant changes for 6.5. The example script draws heavily from other sources and it is now working.
In many situations it is desirable to patch your ESXi host(s) prior to being able to install or use VMware vSphere® Update Manager™. UPDATED 4/18/2016: HP has a new URL for HP Customized VMware ISO’s and VIB’s For example: Prior to installing vCenter in a new cluster Standalone ESXi installations without a vCenter Server Hardware
Read More »