Categorie: VMware

Packer and WinRM – mystery resolved

1 november 2020 Solutions VMware
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…

Using LDAPS with vCenter and AD

12 oktober 2020 VMware
Most companies that connect vCenter to Active Directory are using the Integrated Windows Authentication. At least, that’s what I see. But both VMware and Microsoft have announced changes that are going to change the way you connect your vCenter to AD. VMware announced in the vSphere 7 release notes that…

Backup your homelab… for free!

1 oktober 2020 VMware
I was already using the free Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to make a backup of my personal computer to a share on a server running Windows Server. But I didn’t make a backup of my ESXi server running several VMs for my lab environment. When I downloaded the latest…

Remediation did not succeed

26 september 2020 Solutions VMware
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…

Troubleshooting Host Profiles

2 september 2020 Solutions VMware
A while ago I was working with host profiles to get the hosts compliant with the CIS Benchmarks (https://www.cisecurity.org/benchmark/vmware/). But for some reason, I could not remediate some of the hosts. Issue #1 The error I got was pretty generic… I started looking at log files and decided to download…

ESXi Events flooded… Firewall configuration has changed.

8 juli 2020 Solutions VMware
I was investigating an event that would appear every two minutes, flooding the Events on the host. So the first event in the sequence is “Port vmk1 is now protected by Firewall”. Followed by “Firewall configuration has changed. Operation ‘allowall’ for rule set iSM succeeded” and finally “Firewall configuration has…

YAMS – Yet Another Migration Script

23 juni 2020 PowerCli Script VMware
I was asked if I could write a script that could be used for moving VMs to another data center location. Sounds easy right? Well, there were some specific requirements that made it a bit more challenging… Downtime for the VMs should be kept to a minimum. Some clusters re-use…

Migrating Windows PSC to VCSA – failed to send HTTP data

15 juni 2020 Solutions VMware
I was working on a migration to get rid of a vCenter/PSC running on a Windows server. So I started the VMware Migration Assistant on the PSC that I wanted to migrate. Then I started the vCenter Server Appliance Installer on a different Windows server and filled in the configuration…

Upgrading ESXi 6.0 hosts with PowerCLI

3 april 2020 PowerCli Powershell Script VMware
The last step in my migration project was to actually upgrade the hosts to a supported version. This means that all hosts are upgraded to 6.7 except for those hosts that are a bit to old and only support 6.5. For the upgrade, I used Update Manager to store the…

Migrating ESXi Hosts to Another vCenter Server

6 maart 2020 PowerCli Script VMware
As part of a migration project, ESXi hosts needed to be migrated to a new vCenter appliance. The Cisco 1000v distributed virtual switch was stripped out and converted to standard switches. So basically it was a matter of disconnecting, and removing the hosts from the old vCenter and adding them…