HPE OneView 5.0 SSL & LDAP integration It's been a while since I looked at the HPE OneView Appliance in my Lab. Note: HPE_OneView_5.00.02_ESXi_Z7550-96801.ova used in this Lab. I have a need to configure LDAP in a customer site so I thought I'd take a fresh look at this in my lab first and throw in replacing the default self signed SSL certificate while I was at it. First for the LDAP. This is straight forward enough. About 10 - 15 minutes should cover it. Go to Settings and then Security. Scroll down and Click Add Directory You're aiming for something like this. I chose a serv ..read more

vSphere 7.0 - New Features (VM NVMe Defaults and Shared VMDK disks) This post looks at some of the differences / new features for VMs in vSphere 7.0. When creating a new VM vCenter still defaults to Server 2012 R2 for some reason! With this you get the typical setup, E1000 and LSI SAS scsi controller etc: Now if we choose Server 2016 we start to see a change here. VMware vSphere 7.0 now point you towards the NVMe (NVM Express) Controller by default. This is certainly a change. Pity they leave the E1000 as the default network driver! So, the NVMe Controller is a play which moves beyond the P ..read more

Upgrading to ESXi 7.0 This post will look at upgrading two ESXi hosts to 7.0. Note: One of my nested ESXi hosts kept dropping off the network, even during the vCenter upgrade but didn't cause an issue. I found duplicate DNS entries from an old lab I did previously on my Domain Controller so vCenter was getting the wrong IP address, deleted the old entries and that seemed to help. After it dropped a few minutes later I removed and re-added it into vCenter. So I created an ESXi 7.0 Baseline and attached it to the cluster and ran the remediation pre-check. I just uploaded the full ESXi 7.0 ISO ..read more

Upgrading to vCenter 7.0 So here I'll try a few different upgrade realities to get to vCenter 7.0 and see how things fare. Firstly check your release notes. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-70-release-notes.html Next are you using vCenter 6.7U2c or 6.7U3 with an external platform services controller - you need to upgrade to 6.7U3a first. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/74678 If you coming from a Windows Server (There is NO windows vCenter 7 version anymore!!) make sure all Windows Updates have been applied and are not pending - disable updates if you ..read more

vSphere 7 Coredump I'm just tidying up my vSphere 7 upgraded Host. Found a few things like the following to clean up: Format Datastores with VMFS 6 Upgrade virtual hardware of VMs to version 17 Fix Coredump error (detailed below) Move Scratch Partition to allow original Datastore to be formatted Upgrade Distributed vSwitch version To fix the Coredump problem when I formatted my Datastores I ran the following commands: This is from the following KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2077516 I've converted my VMs to Thin but am seeing that UNMAP is unsupported on one of my Datastores in the v ..read more

vSphere 7 Ate my HBA My whitebox uses a Supermicro Motherboard that has an Intel c612 chipset for it's SATA controllers. I was using these up to the upgrade for 7.0 without issue and an LSI MegaRaid 9271-8i before that. As I stated in my last Post, I upgraded vCenter fine but during the upgrade for ESXi 7.0 got a warning about PCI device compatibility. My storage all disappeared, so I searched for a HBA on eBay to give me the cheapest solution. This turned up anHPE H240 SATA/SAS Controller. I connected everything up and after ESXi Booted, still no Datastores....!!! CRAP!!!! Sometimes the HBA ..read more

vSphere 7 ESXi Upgrade After upgrading vCenter, I now had to upgrade my single ESXi Lab host. I mounted the ISO using the BMC out of band utility and booted off the ISO. I ran into an issue with an NSX VIB however and it blocked the upgrade: Alright, rebooted into ESXi 6.7 and put the host into maintenance mode to remove the offending VIB as follows: esxcli software vib list Now spot your offending VIB in the list - mine has the word nsx in it. Then remove it. esxcli software vib remove -n esx-nsxv Removal Result    Message: Operation finished successfully.    Reboot Required: false    V ..read more

vCenter 7 Lab Upgrade So I downloaded the binaries for vSphere 7 to upgrade my lab and see what's different. The release notes are scary this time to say the least!! The upgrade for vCenter is my first task and here is my notes from that experience: Attempt failed - Duplicate temporary IP Address, my bad!  Attempt failed - Timeout, too much time had expired?! This was when I clicked into the wizard and the precheck came back as failed! Ok, was doing something else, next time I'll babysit! Just got a blanket error this time. So am going to reboot vCenter and apply 1 March 2020 patch just in ..read more

Powershell to clear allowed IP list and allow all IPs I found a few posts on setting specific IPs that are allowed through the ESXi Firewall for services such as SSH and Web Access for instance. What I lacked was a way to manipulate those when I realized I'd made a typo. I had inconsistent settings starting to develop and I wanted to script a way to reset to a blank page again! The script below achieves that. I've also come up with an audit script to verify any rogue servers that have different settings from the default for two services sshServer and webAccess, the ones I was interested in ..read more

vRealize Operations - %CSTP View I was asked to check a cluster to ensure the %CSTP value was looking ok. I didn't fancy logging in with putty onto 40 ESXi Hosts and wondered about an easier way. We had an older version of vRealize Operations Manager in play but I could see any articles on Google about creating a custom report or view specifically for this value. It had been a few months since I played with this product so this post is a refresher for myself in case I need to do this anywhere else in the future! It also might be useful for someone else at some point! Prior to version 7.5 I w ..read more