Tag: vSphere
Rebuilding Distributed Switch on New vCenter Instance Using a Backup
As you may have seen, I recently had a vCenter fail and after working with VMware Support it was determined that the vCenter should be rebuilt from scratch. Rebuilding the vCenter and adding the hosts that were in it was fairly easy. However, restoring their networking was another story. The hosts retained their previous network configuration, but I was unable…
Configuring VMware Backup with BDRSuite: A Step by Step Guide
If you’re looking to backup your VMware environment without having to install agents, then take a look at BDRSuite by Vembu! BDRSuite for VMware offers agentless VM Backup/Recovery for ESXi and vCenter as well as VM Replication Failover/Failback! Replication jobs have the ability to set up network and IP Mapping between source and destination environments for automatic Re-IPing in the…
Rebuilding a Failed vCenter Results in More Problems
At work, I had a vCenter fail and, after working with VMware support for hours, I was told to rebuild the vCenter from scratch. I downloaded the vCenter ISO for the same version as the other vCenters that are linked (7.0.3.01700) and launched the installer. I went through the wizard and selected to join it to the existing SSO Domain.…
BDRSuite’s VMware Backup Solution – My Review
I’ve been using BDRSuite in my homelab for a while now. I wanted to write a quick review of the product based on my experience so far. When I first started with BDRSuite, I was using version 5.0. I’ve been a part of the journey through to version 5.6 and now to 7.0. I’ve seen the product improve greatly along…
PowerShell Script to Login to Multiple vCenter Servers
Do you have multiple vCenter servers that you interact with on a daily basis? Do you like to use PowerShell to manage them? I was opening a PowerShell window, and doing a connect-viserver for each and having to enter my PW over and over again. First, I tried to use the New-VICredentialStoreItem command to store my PW, but with security…
Upgrading VMware Tools on each ESXi Host via ESXCLI
Have you ever wanted to upgrade the version of VMware Tools on your hosts but you’re having an issue with Update Manger/Lifecycle Manager? I ran into this problem recently. I was attempting to upgrade my hosts to the latest version of VMware Tools and even though the remediation completed successfully via Lifecycle Manger finished successfully, each host still reported at…
Deploying Vembu BDR Suite (Part 4 – Replication)
Now that I have Vembu setup and backing up to my local NAS, I thought I should try and replicate some of the data off-site. Where should I replicate to? Lets go with Amazon, as I already have an account established there. First, I created a new S3 bucket to replicate the backup data to. I decided to name it…
Using PowerCLI to Create a Local Scratch Partition
My company recently purchased some Dell Servers with ESXi installed to local SD cards. The issue we had was that the 8gb SD cards that came with the server and there wasn’t enough space on the cards for a scratch partition. We ordered the servers with a single 300gb HD in order to get the RAID controller, so we decided…
Disabling FCOE on vSphere 10gb NICs per VMware KB 2130092
So, we recently had an issue with some of our Dell blade vSphere hosts. Seems they all crashed (PSOD) at the same time (6 nodes across 2 different clusters). After submitting the log bundles and Dell TSRs, support recommended, along with upgrading drivers & firmware (the support go to!) that we remove FCoE from the NICs (as it’s not being…
Configuring my Dell PowerEdge R920 for dual SD Cards instead of Internal HDs
We recently setup a Dell PowerEdge R920 that was in storage to add to our VDI Environment for additional resources. This server differs from the other R920s in our environment as it has dual SD Cards internally instead of Hard Disks. I had to configure the SD Cards in a mirror so we had fault tolerance, so this is the…