While bringing my self-made ESXi hosts into service I saw that only one of two network cards was detected. The reasons for this issue was that VMware ESXi offers no driver for the second network card Intel 82579LM. What a pity. Fortunately I stumbled upon a blog which offers an adequate software packages which was …

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At about two years ago I replaced a lot of my hardware with more power-saving alternatives. My self-made NAS and hypervisor wer replaces by two HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 servers (N36L and N40L) - for a long time I was very happy with them. In the last months the amount of VMs increased and now the CPU and memory …

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A couple of days ago I stumbled upon the following error message while activating Fault Tolerance on a particular virtual machine: Replay is unavailable for the current configuration. First I wasted time by verifying the following topics: checking the VM configuration (vCPUs, OS support, disk provisioning,...) tested …

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A couple of days ago I stumbled upon something I nearly forgot: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware. This is a slightly customized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) created 2010 during a cooperation between VMware and Novell. The most interesting thing about this is that this version is completely …

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VMware published a very useful tiny helper named vSphere Mobile Watchlist. The smartphone application is designed to be used for monitoring and controlling running virtual machines. To avoid beeing overwhelmed by a endless list of virtual machines (of course this depends on the size of your virtual environment) the …

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Recently I discovered the following hint in the vCenter service state overview: Apparently there was a issue with the integrated LDAP service of the vCenter Server Appliance - unfortunately I was not very successful when researching the internet with the appropriate error message: LDAP data backup subcomponent error: …

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When a upload/download of a particular virtual machine on a VMware vSphere ESXi host is not working a common issue is that required network ports are not opened (yeah, it's "always" a firewall issue!). It makes no difference whether you start the process directly on the ESXi host or on a VMware vCenter Server. A common …

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After a recent upgrade from VMware vCenter Server 4.1 to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 and from ESXi 4.1 to 5.5 I was molested by the following message: 1Uplink redundancy lost on DVPorts: "xxxx/xx ..." Physical NIC vmnic1 is down Analysing the switches showed that there was no link flapping. This fault message …

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I was dazzled when I recently saw the following warning message ahile using the vSphere Client: 1Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed Okay - let's do this. I started the requrested consolidation by opening the context menu of the affected virtual machine and clicking "Snapshot" and "Consolidate" - …

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Due to their low price and power consumption HPs tiny MicroServer N36L, N40L and N54L are often used as tiny VMware servers in the basement of enthusiastic nerds and geeks. Especially in combination with faul-tolerant ECC memory and a HP SmartArray P410 SAS controller you can built an adequate solid Enterprise-ready …

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