Ryan Kowalewski

Ryan Kowalewski

Ryan is a Virtualisation/Cloud Technical Specialist working for a FTSE 100 company in the UK. His role focusses mainly on VMware, Azure and automation.

esxi

ESXi Host Certificate Renewal Doesn't Include Full Chain

I have just successfully migrated one of our vCenter 6.0 Windows servers to a brand new 6.7 U1 vCenter Server Appliance. After this migration I configured VMCA to be a intermediate certificate authority to our internal CA. The process for this is relatively straight forward, however, there appears to be an issue in 6.7 (and potentially 6.5) whereby hosts which are subsequently issued a new SSL certificate fail to use the full certificate chain, and therefore still show as untrusted in the browser when accessing the ESXi host client.

vrops

vRealize Operations Manager Upgrade Fails Due To Swap Issue

Today I upgraded my non-production vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) appliance from v6.7 to v7.0. However, when applying the initial OS update .pak file via the admin interface, the upgrade immediately failed with the error message "source ./pak_python_wrapper.sh validate.py" failed. Initially a colleague of mine pointed me to the well known disk space issues (KB article), but a quick look at the disk stats showed that there was plenty of space available on all partitions.

powercli

Storage DRS and PowerCLI Part 1: Get VM Overrides

Introduction With Storage DRS (SDRS) enabled datastore clusters, we have many options to configure overrides on a per-VM basis. For example disabling SDRS for a specific VM or forcing SDRS to keep a VMs VMDK files on separate datastores (anti-affinity). However, one thing which has caught out our 2nd line team recently and caused us some SDRS performance issues is that when you manually Storage vMotion (svMotion) one or more VMDK files and pick a specific datastore as the destination, you have to tick a box that disables SDRS for the particular VM.

vmware

ESXi Loses Connectivity to VMFS Datastores.

Introduction This post explains my recent experiences with certain hosts losing access to some of our VMFS datastores. Hopefully it will help someone avoid the pain that I have been through in diagnosing this issues! The Symptoms I was initially made aware of this issue as it appeared that certain hosts were losing connectivity to VMFS datastores. Upon investigation I found the following events being logged very frequently against multiple hosts.

vrops

vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module

For your reference here is a list of the articles in this mini-series. vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module (this article) Introduction If you have been following along with the previous two articles in this series, you should now have a pretty good understanding of how to manipulate the extensionData container via PowerCLI to generate and download reports from vRealize Operations Manager (vROps).

vrops

vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports

For your reference, here are the articles in this mini-series: vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports (this article) vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module Introduction Following on from the previous article in this mini-series, this article demonstrates how to retrieve a generated report from vROps as a PowerShell object. Downloading A Generated Report The last step of the previous article was to use the GetReport() method to verify that your report generation was complete.

vrops

vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports

For your reference, here are the articles in this mini-series: vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports (this article) vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module Introduction I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) lately, mostly running reports. While this is easy enough to do via the web UI, I found myself running a report, downloading the .

×