Removing/updating vCenter Trusted Root Certificates

Last month I had to update the machine certificate of vCenter (SSL). I prepared the new certificate and the certificate chain. In the end, I was able to change the machine certificate but the Trusted Root certificate of the Intermediate CA was not updated and needed to be replaced. However,…

Update VxRail Manager TLS Certificate

The VxRail Manager VM uses its own SSL certificate that eventually will expire. When this happens an alarm will be shown in vCenter: VXR028008 ALARM SSL certificate is within 30 days of expiring. The alarm has a reference to KB 00194212. However, this KB article only tells you to replace…

VCF pre-check error installing async patch

On 25th October VMware released a Security Advisory (https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0023.html) about two vulnerabilities in vCenter. One of them had a CVSS score of 9,8 (out of 10) so it was very important to patch the vCenter servers in the environment. The environment was based on VCF so you cannot just install…

Cloud Director VAMI Setup – NFS Errors

Today we got some complaints from users about slow VMware Cloud Director tasks. It took 40 minutes to create a VM, 10 minutes to power off, and 10 minutes to eject media. Not good! Not good at all! After logging in to the VAMI of the primary cell we noticed…

VCDA – Operation canceled

I was working on setting up a protection from an on-prem vCenter to a cloud site running VMware Cloud Director but whatever I did, I received an error message “Operation canceled due to an unexpected error”. From my point of view, an error is always unexpected, but I wanted to…

VxRail Console Commands

Find missing disks Update disk information Restart VxRail Manager services Change disk serial number on host Restart VxRail platform service on host

VxRail Cluster Health Monitoring disabled

A while ago I had to change a disk in a vSAN disk group and for some reason, the Physical Health view in vCenter showed the information of the old disk. A closer look told me that Health Monitoring was not enabled so I selected the cluster and looked at…

Veeam Guest Credentials test failed

I was trying to add my laptop to my local Veeam Backup & Replication server but was unsuccessful in adding it to a protection group. The error I received was: Veeam Guest Credentials test failed: rpc connection failed First I tried all the obvious… Adding ports to the local firewall……

Reset your Windows password in 5 minutes

Every once in a while you run into a server that is not in a domain and nobody knows the Administrator password. What do you do? When you boot the server with a standard Windows ISO file you go into the recovery options and open a Command window. In that…