With over 12 years of experience in the Virtualization field, currently working as a Senior Consultant for Evoila, contracted to VMware PSO, helping customers with Telco Cloud Platform bundle. Previous roles include VMware Architect for Public Cloud services at Etisalat and Senior Architect for the VMware platform at the largest retail bank in Slovakia. Background in closely related technologies includes server operating systems, networking, and storage. A former member of the VMware Center of Excellence at IBM and co-author of several Redpapers. The main scope of work involves designing and optimizing the performance of business-critical virtualized solutions on vSphere, including, but not limited to, Oracle WebLogic, MSSQL, and others. Holding several industry-leading IT certifications such as VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-NV, and MCITP. Honored with #vExpert2015-2019 awards by VMware for contributions to the community. Opinions are my own!

VM Latency Sensitivity set to High still fails with no (proper) warning

Hello, it’s been a while since I last blogged, had a busy few years, took a sabbatical or there was nothing to blog about without breaching a NDA. Anyway I’m back here with a new issue which may help some of those who are virtualizing latency sensitive workloads, a niche… Continue reading

ESXi 6.7 U1 fixes: APD and VMCP is not triggered even when no paths can service I/Os

It has been over two years since I blogged about APD handling bug which I discovered, during partial storage outage in my environment. All path down (APD) handling and VMware Component Protection (VMCP) is not working when you have paths physically connected, but they are not able to serve any… Continue reading

Update manager error: hosts could not enter maintenance mode

I started another round of the ESXi patching recently (because of this), when I experienced an unpleasant issue. Some of my clusters failed to remediate using update manager. Hosts failed to enter maintenance mode with the following message: Current progress of remediation: 0 hosts completed successfully, 0 hosts completed with… Continue reading

VMware fixes 2 data corruption bugs and VM to Host escape vulnerability!

alert

Last couple of weeks were definitely busy for the VMware developers. Not only they released vSphere 6.7 U1. They were also busy fixing two critical data corruption bugs: when running VM snapshots on VMFS after disk extends using vSAN 6.6 and later Another important fixed issue is VM escape possibility… Continue reading

VMware SRM Standard limits are Hardcoded since 8.1

Most probably all of you know already, there is a limit in VMware Site Recovery Manager Standard edition, which will allow you to protect up to 75 Virtual Machines. What you may not know (I was surprised even some VMware Pre-Sales guys didn’t), this limit is for a physical facility… Continue reading

Enabling LLDP for Intel X7xx series adapters in ESXi

If you are using Intel X710,XL710 or X722 adapters in your environment, you may have already noticed, that LLDP (Link LayerDiscovery Protocol) is not working for you. And you are getting following message “Link Layer Discovery Protocol is not available on this physical network adapter” Apparently those cards have their… Continue reading

Execute ESXCLI commands during ESXi startup

You may face the situation where you need to run custom commands/scripts while ESXi boot. Although it is not so common situation, as most of the settings done in ESXi are persistent during the reboot, there are some cases. For this purpose there is a file called /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh and you… Continue reading

Mitigate Spectre and Meltdown impact with vSphere ESXi

Meltdown-Spectre

As most of the folks in the IT, I’ve spent last couple of days researching about famous Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their possible impact to our infrastructure. These security flaws are especially bad, not only because they’ve been here for more than 2 decades, but mitigation comes with significant… Continue reading

ESXi installation fail with IBM x3650 M4 and m5110e storage controller after Firmware upgrade

OperationFailed

Yesterday, we experienced a problem where we couldn’t install ESXi on the one of ours IBM x3650 M4 servers. We suspected it could be a firmware issue as we performed a complete firmware upgrades just before the installation. If you already had your ESXi installed and did the firmware upgrade… Continue reading

Bricked QLogic Broadcom BCM57840 after driver update

alert

Two weeks ago, we started with regular updates of our Flex system servers, including drivers and firmwares. It is good practice to update drivers first so I followed this procedure as usually. Our update list included ESXi driver for CN4022 (QLogic Broadcom BCM57840). Since IBM/Lenovo doesn’t provide VMware drivers for… Continue reading