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
My Journey to being VMware Certified Hello again. Its been a while since I’ve logged in and did any sort of updates on this site. Plenty has happened in the past 11 months. Somewhere in that time life happened and had put my DevNet studying aside to focus on my health, family and other non-IT … 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
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
This post is on deploying a new Ubuntu VM, dynamically adding more disks, having the guest OS recognize the new drives and increasing its capacity without rebooting. This is really useful for critical production servers that cannot go down for reboots like a NFS server. Lets get started. OS: I’m using Ubuntu 12.02.4 LTS server OS … Read more
With a lot of servers in my lab, I run into my fair share of ESX boot medium issues in the lab. Typically this exhibits weird issues where the ESX host is online, VMs are incredibly slow or completely hung and ping-able. The quickest way I would determine of the boot media (USB, SD card, … Read more