VCSA 503 Service Unavailable

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

Enabling VNC for ESXi

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

Finding an associated Cisco Fabric Interconnect in ESXi

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

hot-add CPU and memory to Ubuntu guest in VMware

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

vCSA 6.0 automated deployment

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