Recently I’ve been sorting through VVols on vSphere 6.5 with a few storage vendors . Below are some items to be aware of as you are testing or rolling out VVols in your own environment.
DRS vMotion Failure Due to EVC incompatibilities from Spectre/Meltdown Patching
Issue
I ran into an issue recently where DRS was failing to move some VMs between 1 of 3 hosts.
To test the compatibility states I manually attempted a vMotion of one of the affected VMs to each host to see what the recommendations would say in the vCenter Web Client. In this case one of the hosts was failing to provide the following CPU instructions:
- com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.stibp
- com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.ibrs
- com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.ibpb
Why VMware’s Network Insight is showing a large amount of 240.240.240.240 entities
While testing out VMware’s Network Insight I noticed a large amount of source IPs showing up as 240.240.240.240. At first I didn’t recognize that address, especially since it’s a class E range.
According to VMware’s KB it’s a placeholder IP for sets of IP > 5000 addresses in order to prevent system load from becoming too high.
Further details are listed below in the article.
VMware KB: vRNI flows show IP address 240.240.240.240 (2150713)
When ssh esxtop looks all csv…y
Summary
When I SSH into ESXi servers on MacOS and run esxtop, I usually end up with a mostly unreadable CSV dump.
VCSA 6.5 vCenter Failing to Check for Updates with error “Stage failed”
Issue
While we were upgrading one of our VCSA 6.5 vCenter appliances to 6.5 Update 1, I ran into an error Stage failed when trying to check for updates within the port 5480 admin interface.
vCenter Appliance 6.5/6.5U1 Email Alerts Not Working
Issue
Since migrating to the new Photon OS based vCenter 6.5 VCSA Appliance, we’ve had issues with alerts not being sent to email.
As it turns out, there’s a problem with the internal configuration not being updated properly. VMware is aware of it and should hopefully fix it at some stage.
For now you can follow the workaround below.
Fun with vSphere Tags, PowerCLI, and vRealize Operations – Part 1
One of the more powerful features that VMware has added to several product lines lately has been vSphere tags. As time has gone on support for these tags has been added to other products beyond just vSphere vCenter such as vRealize Operations and PowerCLI cmdlets. I still see engineers ask why someone would use tags instead of the older school custom attributes, so I figured I’d show how we use them in my job.
We utilize tags in two specific ways. The first is to use the tags to filter groups of VMs for PowerCLI reporting. In our case we have tags created for each Engineering team so we can customize these reports only for the virtual guests that they have access to.
The second use for these vSphere tags is to filter objects in vRealize Operations for dashboards, policies, alerts, etc. Eventually reports from vRealize Operations may even replace the PowerCLI reports since most of the properties and metrics are already collected from vCenter.
Patching vSphere ESXi to 6.5U1 failing with error 15. Cause: Ran out of VFAT space due to vsantrace and vsanobserver files.
While updating my home lab I ran into an error while patching the ESXi hosts with Update Manager.
The error given was:
The host returns esxupdate error code:15. The package manager transaction is not successful. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details.
Welcome to definebroken.com
Many of us in the IT field have had the experience of customers complaining to us that this “technical thing” is broken. In turn we then usually try to narrow down the issue by replying, “Define … broken?” This site is an effort to provide some of the lessons learned, code I’ve written to solve some of these issues, and other IT related posts to share with others.
define | broken 