While doing a new install of VMware vCenter Server I ran into the following error: Setup cannot create vCenter Server Directory Services instance. Error 28038 This error is caused by the fact that the “Network Service” does not have enough permissions on the root of the drive you’re installing vCenter on. The solution is pretty straight forward and has been [...]

I wrote this article after the KB was release but forgot to click “publish”. Those planning to upgrade their vSphere environment to Update 1 please read the following: KB Article 1016070 Issue Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 fails or times out and rebooting the host results in a purple diagnostic screen Who is affected Customers using VMware vSphere 4 [...]

I just ran into the following issue when I upgraded the customers vCenter Server to 2.5 U4: “”Failed to install the VC agent service” Error Message Appears after VirtualCenter Upgrade”. None of the 3.0.x hosts would connect anymore. Of course the knowledge base provided a simple solution for this known issue.

Just noticed the highly valuable KB articles. I think the title says more than enough: Adding a static route to ESX host for extra service console Identifying Symmetrix devices using the esxcfg-mpath and symdev commands The first one will come in handywhen you added a secondary service console and the second one will come in handy when you need to [...]

VMware released two patches on the 20th of March. Both patches are related to an issue with the Broadcom bnx2x driver. If you are running on hardware with a Broadcom NetXtreme II 57710, 57711, or 57711E NICs be sure to look into the patches below: ESX350-200903412-BG – PATCH – KB 1009232 – General Updates Kernel Source and VMNIX ESX350-200903411-BG – [...]

I just noticed this new KB article: Diskeeper is a 3rd party defragmentation product that has the ability to defragment unmounted NTFS volumes that are presented to the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy. This means that it can defragment RDM LUNs. Unfortunately, this creates the possibility of inconsistencies in the file system if there is a virtual machine running on that [...]

I just received an email from a fellow consultant about a customer which had vCenter tasks time-out every once in a while. At times also ESX hosts got disconnected for no apparent reason at all. He discovered the following article by Richard Blythe aka VMware Wolf: ESX disconnects randomly or when doing VI client tasks from VC, task randomly timeout [...]