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 …

Virtualized Linux guests running on VMware vSphere can only offer the best performance if the helper software VMware Tools in the most recent version.

If you have ever used VMware products you know that constant updates guarantee the support of new operating systems and hardware. But this has also the disadvantage that …

I was dazzled when I recently saw the following warning message ahile using the vSphere Client:

1Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed

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Some system updates (e.g. kernel updates) require the affected Linux system to be rebooted. If the system is managed using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager this reboot can be scheduled after patching the host very comfortably.

However it is possible that after the reboot (watch the output of the uptime …

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 …

When converting a physical Linux server using VMware Converter Standalone the following error message might be displayed if you're using distributed portgroups:

1A general system error occured: failed to poweron vm

I found a hint that indicated that the amount of used vCPUs or cores exceeds the license limit of the …

It is possible that a VM is not responding any more - mostly it's a simple solution to restart the appropriate VM.

Under rare circumstances it is possible that this restart process isn't passing through. An indicator for this issue is that the process (which normally only takes a couple of seconds) needs multiple …

If you're running a PostgreSQL database on a CentOS/RHEL system and moved the data directory to a dedicated partition the following error might occur if you want to monitor the filling level using the Nagios/Icinga plugin check_disk:

1DISK CRITICAL - /var/lib/pgsql/data is not accessible: Permission denied

The reason …

After some time old packages are accumulated in software channels managed by Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager.

Especially at least when your hard drive are threaten to get tanked up you should clean up and remove unneeded packages. For this there is a utility called spacewalk-data-fsck - but this tool only …