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.

I was doing my daily round on the VMTN Forums and noticed this topic on VMs flickering between ESX hosts. I’ve personally never witnessed this and didn’t even knew it was a known issue. Luckily Troy Clavell pointed the topic starter out to a KB article related to this exact issue. Apparently it’s being caused by the fact that the [...]

VMware just release this KB article which is definitely one you should read if you use the VMware HA advanced option. In short: When you edit the HA advanced options they do not take effect until you re-enable HA on the cluster. Be aware of this when implementing or troubleshooting HA it can cost you a lot of time.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Train Signal, the post included a reduction coupon, YELLOWBRICKS. This coupon gives you 25% reduction on the Train Signal virtualization CBTs. Train Signal was so kind to also provide me with an additional coupon that gives you free shipping: All you need to do is head over to Train Signal and enter [...]

During several projects I noticed that for some reason the vCenter service would not start correctly. After a quick browse in “services.msc” and the eventlog I noticed that the vCenter service started before the SQL service. As you can imagine vCenter needs SQL to be up and running before it can actually start. I fixed it by creating a dependency. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]