Encountered a new issue seen on a vCenter after we had a power outage: “PBM error occurred during PreMigrateCheckCallback: Connection refused. This error was met when we tried cloning or creating a new VM in any of the hosts connected to the vCenter. I fixed the issue by SSH’ing to the vCenter and dropping into … Read more
Today I dealt with the infamous VCSA 503 Error. This is a typical problem with VCSAs and when searching for this issue, there is tons of web results pointing to different things. I stumbled across this really good troubleshooting workflow in this KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67818#service_unavailable_flow_chart. To start debugging, you will need the following: 1. Local … Read more
I came across this cool HTML5-based management interface for KVM hosts. Its called kimchi-project (https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/). In this guide, i’ll show you how to install it on an Ubuntu 16.04 host and manage your guest VMs. Pre-installation steps If you haven’t installed quemu, go ahead and do that now. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y … Read more
In CentOS you can check to see if your dhcpd.conf file has any syntax errors before you restart DHCP and it fails to come up. You’ll need to run a command called dhcpd and point it to your configuration file like this: [root@dhcp-server ~]# dhcpd -t -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf If you run into any syntax … Read more
Sometimes in home lab environments you don’t have access to resources like vCenter to look at the guest VM status via console. Fortunately, you can modify ESX to enable VNC to a guest VM and use any computer to get KVM access. Pre-requisites: Network connectivity from your client to the ESXi host Root SSH access … Read more
If you have SSH access to your ESX server, smbiosDump has some very useful information. If you look in “OEM Strings: #14”, you can see some very useful information: [root@ucs-test1:~] smbiosDump | grep “OEM Strings: #14” -A 4 OEM Strings: #14 $SPI:rack-unit-13 <- Server ID $SPT:hx-nodes <- Service Profile Template $SYS:test-fi1 <- Fabric Interconnect This … Read more
Virtualization has made our lives easier. We can spin up new resources for applications, dynamically add more disk space, migrate them, etc. In vSphere, we can dynamically add additional memory and vCPU to a guest VM without any downtime (assuming its been enabled prior to powering on). Now in Ubuntu 12.04, I had two production … Read more
Ever wondered how do you find out what vCenter server is managing (or if there is any) a ESXi host? I’ve struggled for a while since there is no way via command line to see this information. vim-cmd, esxcli or esxcfg commands show nothing. I normally resorted to my Windows VM, launch the vSphere C# … Read more
Doing the first batches of vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 6.0 deployment was kinda…rough. Playing around with the OVA and getting annoyed at the web-based deployment option kind of slowed us down. At my current job we prefer vCSA’s for our Test and Dev environments and dont want to deal with Windows Server. Fortunately VMware has given … Read more
Ever tried deploying an OVA but the VM version is not supported by your ESX host? Heres how you can modify the vmx file to make it compatible with your host Uncompress the OVA archive. It can be done with a compression utility like 7-zip. You should now have three different type of files: .mf … Read more