After upgrading our hosts to ESXi 6.0 U1, none of our Veeam jobs would run. After much searching, we found out that SSLv3 is disabled by default and is the reason the jobs weren’t completing. There are a couple of KBs describing the issue, but the quick and fast solution for us was to add […]

Here is some great information about backing up and restoring ESXi host configurations. Great for taking backups before updating. The host profiles after restoring were all compliant too. vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –server=ESXi_host_IP_address –username=root -s output_file_name Where ESXi_host_IP_address is the IP address of the ESXi host and output_file_name is the name of the backup file you will create. […]

Don’t forget to configure the scratch partition! At VMworld I was surprised at the number of questions I was asked related to booting ESXi off of USB/SD.  Unfortunately, the vSphere docs largely assume you will use a local disk and don’t really cover USB/SD, as such it’s not always easy to find answers to common questions.  […]

While trying to update our ESXi 5.5 host to 6.0. the error “Cannot run upgrade script on host” occurred at ~93%. After some googling, we found the below website (it referenced ESXi 5.0 but it worked for the 5.5–>6.0 upgrade), whose second option resolved our issue. The basic resolution steps were… disable HA for the cluster […]

While trying to create a host profile on one of our ESXi hosts, we came across this error: Cannot configure or query coredump partition These hosts are all booted using a USB key (to maximize available direct attached storage space) so perhaps this was why the coredump partition wasn’t configured. Nonetheless, the only resolve was to […]

Trying to import the client’s workstations and servers into the current vsphere environment. After taking a system image within Windows, I mounted the USB device (with WindowsImageBackup directory in the disk’s root) and restored into the VM. Subsequent boot yielded BSOD. Stumbled upon this VMware KB article which solved the problem first shot. Click Start > Run, type regedit, and […]

After deploying a Proliant ML150 G6 with ESXi 5.5U2 to a remote office, the users were complaining of dismal performance. After investigating and reviewing various metrics of the machine, we noticed very high disk latencies (average of 20ms). After doing some “Googleing”, it was decided to install the Battery-Backed-Write-Cache battery module (what a mouthful!). Yes, one would […]

Good resource when maintaing a battery for a P410 controller running ESXi5.5U2 on HP ML150G6. via HP Smart Array CLI commands on ESXi | Kalle’s playground.

I was trying to figure out why nothing would happen after I tried to install the vSphere client on my Windows 8.1 workstation. Thanks to Brian’s quick tip, I was able to install it without a hitch: Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:F:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess Thanks Brian! via Installing vSphere client on Windows 8.1 | Brian […]

Explicitly assign permissions to the vCenter server for the “Domain Admins” group by logging in as the local administrator, select the vCenter server, then go to the “Manage” and “Permissions” tabs.  There you can add full admin permissions for the “Domain Admins” group. via vCenter Single Sign-On 5.5 Not Recognizing Nested Active Directory Groups | VMware vSphere Blog – […]