All posts in category VMware

Migrating to embedded PSC, mind the decommission order.

I recently migrated a few vSphere environments with external PSC’s to vSphere 7 and noticed some PSC leftovers afterwards. Now a lot is already written about the deprecation of the External Platform Services Controller (PSC) deployment model so I will not go into this. What I do want to highlight is the importance of the […]

Filtering and Auditing within vRealize Log Insight

The article below describes one of the ways to implement vRealize Log Insight into an environment where a (security departments) syslog server is already available and where this server ideally only receives filtered events and auditing information around changes to the filters. Let’s start of by saying that with the introduction of ESXi6, VMware makes […]

Reset VMware Auto Deploy Database to default

One of the things that the VMware Auto Deploy Database contains is the ESX Images that are uploaded and related to the DeployRules that are created. For instance, if I add an ESXi Image to the software depot and create a new DeployRule using the following commands: Add-EsxSoftwareDepot “VMware-ESXi-6.0.0.update01-3380124.x86_64-Dell_Customized-offline-bundle-A04.zip” Get-EsxImageProfile | ft -autosize New-DeployRule -Name […]

The OVF package is invalid and cannot be deployed.

While deploying a random OVF image within vSphere I received the following error message: The provided network mapping between OVF networks and the system network is not supported by any host.

BL460c Gen8: Not detecting SD-Card during ESXi 5.1 Installation

While installing new HP BL460c Gen8’s (Xeon E5-2680 v2) we discovered some strange behavior while setting the HP Power Profile setting to “Maximum Performance”. It appears that this setting causes the ESXi 5.1 Installer to not see the Internal SD-Card as storage device anymore. Default BIOS Settings give us this, which is good:

Auto Deploy: ESXi Stateful Install with multiple LUNs connected fails

Recently I have been experiencing some troubles with VMware Host Profiles, Auto Deploy and the stateful install of ESXi 5.1 (Update 1). After the Host Profile gets applied, the system eventually times out with the message: “The request failed because the remote server took too long to respond” as indicated on the screenshot below.

Migrate to new vCenter Server while using dvSwitches

During vSphere 4.x to 5.x updates I occasionally run into the situation where dvSwitches are used on the current vCenter4  and the customer wants to install a fresh copy of vCenter5 (with a new dvSwitch). Within this article I will describe a minimum downtime (1 ping-loss or less) procedure to cover this, guided by pictures […]

Datacenters vs Clusters within the vCenter Inventory

Recently I got involved in a discussion about “Creating multiple Datacenters with one Clusters rather than one Datacenter with multiple Clusters” First of all lets get the definitions of these objects summarized (as stated in the vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide) Clusters A collection of ESX/ESXi hosts and associated virtual machines intended to work together as […]

Self-employed, delivering Virtualization Consultancy

After working for VMware for over a year I decided to take the next step in my career: to start Van Ditmarsch Consultancy As a contractor I will be available to do Virtualization Consultancy, primarily focused on designing, implementing and/or validating VMware Virtualization solutions with a strong focus on business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery. […]