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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New year, new book - some of you might have noticed it: in the last couple of weeks, there were not much updates on my blog. The reason is that I have been working on a second book project. This time I had the pleasure to work as main author on a book about VMware vSphere. Last year, I have already been working as …

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One of the rumors regarding VMware vSphere 6 was that a kind of slim vSphere Web Client will be part of ESXi to replace the outdated vSphere Client (legacy client). ESX offered a web-based administration utility, that has been completely removed in ESXi. Since then, the web interface of ESXi is only capable of browsing …

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Some of you might have recognized that it has been surprisingly quiet on my blog in the last couple of weeks. The reason for this was not that I have not been keen for blogging - rather I was working on something bigger that I'd love to present you today. 🙂 It is nothing less than a book about VMware vSphere named …

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While booting a virtualized cluster node I stumped upon a suspicious error message recently: Module DiskEarly power on failed to lock file In the VMware forums I found a hint that locking mechanisms might account for this issue. However the thread focussed on desktop products and not on vSphere. I found no lock files …

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This week VMware introduced plenty of new, long-awaited product versions during an online event. I also joined this event to see the further development that was taking place since VMworld 2014. vSphere 6 The biggest highlight was vSphere 6 - in accordance with VMware this is the "biggest release ever". With …

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Many software cluster solutions require shared storage between all cluster nodes. A very prominent example for this might be Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters). In enterprise environments shared cluster storage is often implemented using SAN storage that is connected to multiple systems. For (private) test …

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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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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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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 …

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