Category: VMware

19. September 2023

Configuring LACP on Distributed Switches – VMware vSphere 8 & Dell VxRail

With Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support on a vSphere distributed switch, you can connect ESX hosts to physical switches using dynamic link aggregation. Multiple link aggregation groups can be created on a distributed switch to aggregate bandwidth from physical NICs to ESXi hosts connected to LACP port channels. Most of you have probably created a LACP configuration on a distributed switch in various customer […]

25. August 2023

vSAN hyperconverged cluster configuration alarm ‘Host compliance check for hyperconverged cluster configuration’

I worked with a customer today to add 2 more nodes to their VMware vSAN Streched Cluster. Which worked for now, but we got a warning under the cluster summary: We have added the new nodes manually, it must be said at this point now. Which in turn leads to this warning, because the customer has configured its VMware vSAN Streched Cluster intially via Quickstart. […]

21. August 2023

Lost connectivity to the device naa.61xxxxxx backing the boot filesystem 

Today I noticed that my ESXi 04 displays the following information: Lost connectivity to the device naa.61xxxxxx backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.61xxxxxx. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage. So let us open a SSH session to have a look at the mentioned device by using following command: As we can see, there are some Failed Operations, to get […]

10. August 2023

Invalid virtual machine configuration. Object policy is not compatible with datastore space efficiency policy configured on the cluster

Today I have configured a 2 node vSAN Streched Cluster with a customer in their existing vSphere environment. For this we created our own cluster, integrated the hosts accordingly into the existing virtual distributed switches and configured HA & DRS. Then it was about the vSAN configuration, for this the customer has 2 disk groups per host with 1x 1.6TB cache and 3x 3.84TB capacity […]

5. July 2023

Performing a Reconfigure for vSphere HA operation on a primary node may cause an unexpected virtual machine failover

Yep, the Warning Message is that long! 😀 This is what I got from a customer, their vSphere Skyline Health was showing the above mentioned Warning: *Sorry for the poor quality picture. 🙂 If you manually reconfigure the primary HA host for HA, this forces the secondary host to find a new primary host. The newly elected primary host places the VMs that were running […]

21. June 2023

How to Update VMware VCSA 8 Offline via patch ISO

A few days ago I had the challenge to upgrade my customers vSphere environment offline. So I thought, yep, you have to do a blog post about that. There are indeed situations where a direct upgrade via internet is not possible e.g. in darksites, security customers and many more. But also for environments where the internet connection might not be reliable enough. In such cases […]

14. June 2023

Create/Show/Delete Snapshots with ESXi CLI

In various situations (mostly in the context of automation), I have been asked by DevOps colleagues how to take a snapshot of a VM via CLI. The whole thing works with a vim-cmd command. You need access via SSH to the respective ESXi server, then we list all available VMs: Then we note the VMID from which we want to create a snapshot. In our […]

24. March 2023

Introduction to NSX Advanced Load Balancer and Deployment without NSX-T

We find plenty of tutorials on how to deploy and configure the NSX Advanced Load Balancer in conjunction with NSX-T. I am one of the few who do not have NSX-T in their HomeLab, so in this tutorial I would like to briefly show you the NSX ALB deployment without NSX-T. But first let us talk about the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formaly known as […]