App Volumes permissions on ESXi host

We are using AppVolumes Manager on several environments together with Horizon View. When we were deploying the first AppVolume Manager I was asked to provide permissions for AppVolume Manager to local ESXi hosts to avoid using root permissions. There are guides which you can use to setup all required permissions… Continue reading

Horizon – One Golden Image, multiple Desktop Pools

Horizon logo

How to reduce the overhead of managing multiple Desktop Pools under Horizon? This is the question that everyone asks when they have multiple Desktop Pools serving multiple customers and one Golden Image for each of them. Answer to this question is very simple, multiple snapshots on the same Golden Image.… Continue reading

vCenter HA over Layer 3 Network: Step-by-Step Guide

Intro To clarify, vCenter HA over Layer 3 means that vCenter Active, Passive and Witness nodes will be running on different subnets. And I am not talking about the HA network, I am taking about the Management network. This of course means that you will need to rewrite your DNS… 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!

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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

HDD failed in vSAN cluster (Softlayer) – how to replace it

In this article I would like to show you how to replace failed HDD (or SSD) drive in VMware vSAN cluster running on Softlayer Cloud. 1. Open web-client and navigate to: Hosts and Clusters -> choose Cluster -> Manage -> Settings -> Virtual SAN -> Disk Management You will see all… Continue reading