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…

Packer and WinRM – mystery resolved

A while ago I started exploring Hashicorp Packer in order to learn more about a new way of creating Windows template VMs. Traditionally, you create a VM, attach the Windows ISO file and of you go… But with Packer, you can define the whole thing in code and store that…

Remediation did not succeed

I was patching a lot of ESXi hosts but had some trouble with one of the clusters. Remediation did not work and in the Events for the first host I saw two events:Could not install patches on <host name>Remediation did not succeed for <host name> A quick search on the…