VMware

Hello everyone This time I come to show you the integration of VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics (VSHD) with VMware vCenter. I will also show you how to run the diagnostics to know how is the health of your Virtual infrastructure. VSHD is a self-diagnostic platform that allows to detect and solve problems in both vSphere and vSAN product line. This tool provides recommendations in the form of Knowledge Base articles or links to troubleshooting procedures. vSphere administrators can use this tool to troubleshoot issues before contacting VMware Global Support. ...

In this opportunity I come to show you how to download and use the vCheck tool that is used to validate the health status of the VMware vSphere infrastructure. This tool is developed by Alan Renouf as a mechanism to identify possible failures or misconfiguration in the vSphere implementation. To learn more about this tool I will use the vCheck documentation as a reference: This script picks on the key known issues and potential issues scripted as plugins for various technologies written as Powershell scripts and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is checking your email. ...

In this blog I will be talking about how to automate the creation of documentation reports of our virtual infrastructure. There are several commercial solutions to generate this type of report, but I will be talking about As Built Report a free tool that uses powershell as a base to build the reports. The As Built Report tool uses the VMware.PowerCLI modules that we explained previously in our blog. If you want to know more about PowerCLI follow this link here . An important fact about As Built Report is that it is not only used to generate reports on VMware but also supports the following products: ...

In this blog I will be showing you how to install the PowerCLI tool specifically on the ArchLinux operating system. Archlinux is an advanced Linux distribution that is characterized by being simple and lightweight. Additionally, it offers the user full control in managing and modifying everything related to the system. Well, to install and use PowerCLI we have to install Powershell first. PowerShell is a cross-platform automation and configuration tool. PowerShell has a large number of commands oriented to system administration. But at the same time, PowerShell is a full-featured programming language that allows writing functional programs. There are many Powershell-based administration tools from different manufacturers such as: ...

The vSphere 7.0 U2 release provides the ability to use native snapshot when using the NFS protocol as the access mechanism. As described on the VMware blog: NFS Improvements NFS required a clone to be created first for a newly created VM and the subsequent ones could be offloaded to the array. With the release of vSphere 7.0 U2, we have enabled NFS array snapshots of full, non-cloned VMs to not use redo logs but instead use the snapshot technology of the NFS array in order to provide better snapshot performance. The improvement here will remove the requirement/limitation of creating a clone and enables the first snapshot also to be offloaded to the array. ...

In this blog, I will be talking about how you can optimize RAM utilization in your HomeLab. The main objective of this tutorial is that you can achieve higher levels of consolidation while running your labs. Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is a method by which duplicate copies of memory pages are consolidated. In other words, the concept of TPS is somewhat similar to deduplication. This helps the ESXi server to free up repeated memory blocks of a virtual machine allowing for increased levels of consolidation. ...

In this bog, I will be validating if the “ESXi QuickBoot” feature works in Nested mode i.e. running ESXi in a VM. First you must know exactly how QuickBoot works and all the requirements it has. To do this I will use the VMWare portal documentation as a reference: Quick Boot is a vSphere feature that speeds up the upgrade process of an ESXi server. A regular reboot involves a full power cycle that requires firmware and device initialization. Quick Boot optimizes the reboot path to avoid this, saving considerable time from the upgrade process. ...

This is one of my favorite feature in vSphere 7 Update 2. VMware now provides the capability to use a new native key provider for encryption. Allowing us to use vSAN encryption, VM encryption and vTPM natively without the requirement to deploy an external Key provider. In the past this capability can only be provided by using a 3rd party solution like Hytrust KeyControl. In this post I will explain how easy is to configure and deploy this awesome new feature. ...

In vSphere 7 update 1 VMware added a new capability for Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology consisting of three VMs called agents. The agent VMs form the quorum state of the cluster and have the ability to self-healing. So if you turn off or delete the VMs called vCLS the vCenter server will turn the VMs back on or re-create the VMs again. For HomeLab purposes this new feature consumes CPU resource, Memory and disk space which although minimal is not worth having a configuration that adds nothing to a test and development environment. ...