Issues When Creating Custom ESXi ISO Image Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager
I use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to create custom ESXi iso images when upgrading or installing ESXi for customers but the process has some issues that I will address in this post. The first issue is that you are unable to export the file because the port number in the URL is wrong and you get…
ESXi Temporary Directory Exist Error on VCF Upgrade Precheck
I helped a customer upgrading from VCF 4.3 to 4.4 and encountered the following error message during the Upgrade Precheck: “ESXi Temporary Directory Exist” Expanding the error message gave me the following error description with several remediation suggestions: “Directory /locker on host does not support the upgrade for resource, Please check” None of the suggestions…
Convert vSphere Lifecycle Manager Mode in VCF
I recently had a customer who was unable to upgrade the Management Workload Domain in their VCF 4.3 deployment. After digging around for a while I found that the cluster was configured with vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images which is not compatible with the following features which they were using: – Stretched Cluster -…
DHCP is crucial for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
When deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) one can choose between configuring NSX-T Host Overlay using a static IP Pool or DHCP. This is specified in the vcf-ems-deployment-parameter spreadsheet which is used by the Cloud Builder appliance to bring up the Management Workload Domain as you can see in the following images: If No is chosen,…
vCenter 7.0 requires LACP v2
When upgrading to vCenter 7.0 one of the prerequisites to check is the versions of the existing vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS) in the environment. They need to be at version 6.0 or higher. Recently I was helping a customer upgrading to vCenter 7.0 and all their VDS’es were at version 6.6.0, and all other prerequisites…
Unable to query vSphere health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details.
I have been helping quite a few customers with upgrading to vSphere 7.0 lately. In this post I will share an issue we encountered when upgrading from vCenter 6.7 to 7.0 and how we resolved it. Prior to starting the upgrade I always do a thorough health check of the existing environment. The following error…
Running vSAN Witness in The Cloud
vSAN Stretched Cluster requires three independent sites; two data sites and one witness site. If you don’t have a third site, you can run the vSAN Witness Appliance in the cloud. This post will show you how I deployed a vSAN Witness Appliance in Proact Hybrid Cloud (PHC) which runs VMware Cloud Director. I started…
New Undocumented Feature in NSX-T 3.2 MC
Migration Coordinator (MC) is VMware’s tool to migrate from NSX Data Center for vSphere (NSX-V) to NSX-T Data Center (NSX-T). Last week I was helping a customer migrating their Distributed Firewall Configuration from NSX-V to NSX-T 3.2 and we were presented with a new step in the process called “Prepare Infrastructure”. I have never seen…
Deploy Nested VCF to NSX-T Overlay
I have used VLC to deploy nested VCF for a long time and I am quite happy with how it works. VLC is usually deployed to a VLAN Trunk Port Group. This requires the VLANs used in the nested VCF to be configured on the physical switches in the environment. This does not scale well,…
Upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 in my Lab
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 was just released so I wanted to check out what was new and upgrade my lab. Going into SDDC Manager and selecting Lifecycle Management and Release Versions gave me an overview of what is new: Flexible vRealize Suite product upgrades: Starting with VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 and vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.6.2,…
NSX-v to NSX-T – End-to-End Migration #1
The End of General Support for VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere (NSX-v) was January 16, 2022. More details can be found here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85706 If you are still running NSX-v, please start planning your migration to NSX-T as soon as possible as this may be a complex and time consuming job. I have done several…
Upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3 in my Lab
VMware just released VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.3 and I have several customers planning to upgrade in the near future, so I decided to upgrade my lab to get some experience. I also have two customers planning to deploy VCF 4.3 on new hardware so I will also soon deploy it from scratch to see…
NSX-T Federation in my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Lab
VCF 4.2 introduced support for NSX-T Federation which provides the ability to manage, control and synchronize multiple NSX-T deployments across different VCF instances which could be in a single region or deployed across regions. You can stretch Tier-0 and Tier-1 Gateways, Segments, and Groups used for Firewalling. Requirements between sites are maximum round-trip time of…
Multi-Instance Management in my VCF Lab
Multi-Instance Management (VCF Federation) allows you to monitor and manage multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances from a single console. You can view inventory across the VMware Cloud Foundation instances in the federation as well as the available and used capacity. You can also see if any patches are ready to be installed in any of…
My first VMware PSO Project
Who is VMware Professional Services (PSO)? “VMware Professional Services, the largest services organization of experienced IT professionals focused solely on virtualization, provides industry-leading Consulting, Education, and Technical Account Manager services that enable customers to transform IT environments through virtualization and realize greater value from flexible, agile IT service delivery models sooner, with less risk.” I…
Avoid Packet Loss in NSX-T
I have been working a lot with NSX-T the last few years and I have come across a misconfiguration that may cause massive packet loss for the workloads connected to Overlay segments. Since NSX-T 2.5, the recommended Edge Node design has been the “Single N-VDS – Multi-TEP” design which looks like this: What people, and…
vCenter Server blocked by NSX firewall
Recently I had a customer calling me with panic in his voice. He had managed to create a rule in NSX where sources and destinations were both any, and action was set to drop. This rule was added high up in the rule set so almost all their workloads were blocked from the network, including…
VMware Cloud Foundation in a Lab
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is basically a package containing vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and vRealize Suite elegantly managed by something called SDDC Manager. Everything is installed, configured and upgraded automatically without much user intervention. VCF is based on VMware Validated Design, so you get a well-designed, thoroughly tested and consistent deployment. Upgrading is also a lot…
Introduction to my Labs
Yes, I intentionally wrote Labs, as this post will introduce you to both my home lab and to the lab environment running in my employers data centers. I have just built a small home lab for the first time in many years. A lab is very important for someone like me who is testing new…
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