vmware

Redistribute VMs according to a stored mapping

This is a quick one. Sometimes you need to evacuate VMs from a host, do some maintenance, and redistribute the VMs to the originating host. This can be annoying, especially if you don’t have a vSphere Enterprise Plus license with DRS, DRS groups etc. These few PowerShell lines may help you. ,

VMware is now Broadcom - time to move on

In May 2022, Broadcom announced that it will buy VMware for outstanding $69 billion USD. 18 months later, in November 2023, China finally approved the merger. Chinese regulators were the latest in a long line of authorities to approve the takeover. VMware was gone. It was no “by Broadcom”. And not only the name changed. There were already countless rumors in the 18 months before the takeover. Broadcoms CEO, Hock Tan, was known for trimming companies for profit.

Upgrade to ESXi 7.0: Missing dependencies VIBs Error

This error gets me from time to time, regardless which server vendor, mostly on hosts that were upgraded a couple of times. In this case it was a ESXi host currently running a pretty old build of ESXi 6.7 U3 and my job was the upgrade to 7.0 Update 3c. If you add a upgrade baseline to the cluster or host, and you try to remediate the host, the task fails with a dependency error.

Escaping special characters in proxy auth passwords in vCenter

EDIT: It seems that his was fixed in vCenter 7.0 U3. While debugging a vCener Lifecycle Manager, which was unable to download updates, I’ve stumbled over a weird behaviour, which is (IMHO) by design. Some of you might use a proxy server. And some of you might use a proxy server which requires credentials. In my case, my customer uses a Sophos SG appliance as a web proxy server with authentication.

Configure VMware Horizon View client device certificate authentication

Adding a second factor to your authentication is always a good idea. Typically the second factor is a One-Time Password (OTP) or a push notification. But what if you want to allow the login into your Horizon View environment only from specific devices? This implies that you need some kind of second factore that also identifies the device. At this point the arch enemy of many of us comes into play: Certificates!

VMware vCenter 7.0 U2 deployment fails at stage 2

Today I had to deploy a new vCenter appliance. Nothing fancy, new deployment. Stage 1 was easy, but stage 2 failed several times. I re-deployed the vCenter appliance two times, but as the deployment failed for the third time, I took a look into the logs. The deployment failed without any error, but it didn’t finished. It stopped during the start of different services without any error. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0

VCAP-DCV Design 2021 - Objective 1.1 Gather and analyze business requirements

This blog post covers objective 1.1 (Gather and analyze business requirements) of the VCAP-DCV Design 2021 exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update December 2019). When you get the task to design something , you will instinctively start gathering information about the requirements that have to be fulfilled. Everything IT is doing should support the business in some way.

VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 – Data Center Virtualization Design Exam (VCAP-DCV Design 2021)

In August 2018 I’ve passed the VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam. After a busy first half of 2019 it’s time to start preparing the VMware Certified Advanced Professional — Data Center Virtualization Design 2019 exam. But I lost focus and in 2020 I had a lot to do - but not VMW related and so I also missed my goal to take the VCAP-DCV Design exam. I have to push myself, so I decided to re-cap my half finished blog series to get myself back on track.

Two registry changes to improve physical Horizon View Agent experience

Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me. On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by misconfigured firewall policies, but this was completly out of scope in this case, because my collegues never had issues with black screens.

vCenter Server migration to 6.7 fails with "Failed to check VMware STS. The SSL certificate of STS service cannot be verified"

There are still customers out there that are running vCenter Server on a Windows host. This year, despite the fact that most customers have set project on hold, I managed some of them to migrate to a vCenter Server Appliance. Some days ago I had an meeting with one of my favorite customers to migrate their vCenter Server 6.5 to a vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 U3l. They were still on 6.