One of my customers experienced high CPU load on their physical switch. After some investigation they noticed broadcasts packets being sent every two seconds. The first reaction was Beacon Probing is probably enabled. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. But VMware GSS came to the rescue and pointed us towards a KB article. Apparently a bug has been identified in 4.0 which [...]
I was just playing around with the HA Cli and noticed that when you give an “ln” (listNodes) that the failover coordinator (aka master primary) is also listed. I have never noticed this before, but don’t have a pre-vSphere 4.1 environment to test it on to see if this existed before 4.1. If you want to test it in your [...]
We were just talking about some random VMware acronyms during a lab day and I thought I would write the ones down which some of us didn’t know. (Even google did not have the answer to some) I guess the most difficult one to figure out was VPXA/VPXD, which refers to VPX which was the official name for vCenter back [...]
On an internal mailing list we had a very useful discussion around storage migrations when a SAN is replaced or a migration needs to take place to a different set of disks. Many customers face this at some point. The question usually is what is the best approach? SAN Replication or Storage vMotion… Both have its pros and cons I [...]
A week ago I already touched on this topic but I wanted to get a better understand for myself what could go wrong in these situations and how vSphere 4.1 solves this issue. Pre-vSphere 4.1 an issue could arise when shares had been set custom on a virtual machine. When HA fails over a virtual machine it will power-on the [...]
As many of you already know there is an issue with the encryption mechanism of ESX(i) 4.1. When passwords are used which are longer than 8 characters the password will be truncated after the 8th character. As such during authentication only the first 8 characters are used. In other words if you have a 10 character password you will only need to [...]
There’s a cool new feature added to vSphere 4.1 for HA. If an error occurs you can easily check what the issue is by going to your cluster and clicking the “Cluster Operational Issues” line on the Summary tab. If there are no issues the screen will be completely gray. I forced an issue though so you can see what [...]
