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 [...]

Today I’ve been troubleshooting a weird problem with a VMware Update Manager installation. VMware Update Manager was installed with a different port than usual because IIS was already running on the server. When trying to install the plugin the following error appeared: Unable to connect to the remote server I would have expected that in either extension.xml or vci-integrity.xml in [...]

I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following: inconsistent portgroup names inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts [...]

I was just troubleshooting a problem with permissions and roles at a customer site within vCenter. For some weird reason we could not create a VM. I hardly ever use this functionality and if I do it’s mostly on a “Hosts & Clusters” level. This customer wanted to set permissions on a “HA-DRS” Cluster level. Each cluster will be administered [...]

Yesterday I blogged about the Powershell script that Hugo Peeters created for adding a snapshot Column to your VI Client with Powershell. Hugo used a custom field to show this data and I wrote the following: Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that [...]

This will probably take me a couple of weeks and maybe months to get fully adjusted to the new names VMware is going to use for their products. Most of the name changes were already announced during VMworld. And there are three major ones in the actual list: VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter VDI → VMware View VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS [...]