When automatically customizing openSUSE 15.2 guests under VMware vSphere 6.7 recently, I stumbled upon the famous "Guest Customization failed" issue (once again). After eliminating the most common error (not having Perl installed which is necessary) I had a look at the VMware Compatibility Guide. Looks like …

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When reinstalling one of my homelab vSphere cluster nodes I noticed again, that the Intel driver ixgbe is not part of the ESXi base image. This driver is needed for my Supermicro mainboard X10SDV-TP8F in order to enable 10G networking. On the VMware download section there is an appropriate download for ESXi 6.0. …

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Recently I had massive problems with deploying some VMware appliances under vSphere 6.5. Independently of the frontend (Host Client, HTML 5 Client, Web Client, C# Client) I was unable to deploy templates in a clean way at all - mostly aborts and "generic system failures" occured. Mark Brookfield gave me the …

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When using an older vRO workflows (vRealize Orchestrator) I stumbled upon the problem that too many information needed to be entered manually. In this case it is easy to enter information incorrectly so I was looking for a possibility to avoid unnecessary inputs. During my researches I stumbled upon Configuration …

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More than a year ago, I upgraded my home lab to get started with vSAN. Back then I decided to go for a small hardware upgrade and already feared that the new resources will lack again very soon. And of course that happened after a short time, when I installed the vSAN cluster. Back then I already heard about the Xeon D …

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When deploying vCenter Server 6.5 recently, I stumbled upon an issue that I was able to reproduce for the versions 6.5c and 6.5d. When deploying the appliance using the vCSA UI installer, the second stage always crashed with an error like this: 1Unable to connect to vCenter Single Sign-On: Failed to connect to SSO; …

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If you're utilizing Red Hat Satellite 6 for managing virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances, you will need to leverage Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) for maintaining licenses. In comparison with the former Red Hat Network Classic licensing, signed manifest certificates are used. For bigger system landscapes …

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Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enables creating incremental backups of virtual machines. In comparison with conventional VM backups, guest hard drives are synchronized. Using CBT, the hypervisor detects changed blocks and the backup software will only store these blocks. Unfortunately these are some vSphere and backup …

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Photon OS is minimalistic RPM-based Linux distribution which is focussed on running Docker containers. It was optimized for VMware platforms (Workstation, Fusion, vSphere, vCloud Air) - e.g. its Linux kernel offers a caching mechanism optimized for vSphere. Another characteristic is the customized package manager tdnf …

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With this article, I'm starting a blog series I'm really excited about. It's all about VMware's vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) - a very might tool than can simplify a VMware administrator's workaday life heavily. 🙂 What is vRealize Orchestrator? vRO is a utility for automating IT processes around virtual environments. It …

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