I had a question about a limit a customer was hitting with the VM notes using the vSphere (H5) Client. They noticed that whenever they got around ~260 or so characters, they could not add any characters beyond that unless they deleted some. After talking to an engineer within VMware I found out that this is indeed the limit for the vSphere Client today. Through the API, and of course also PowerCLI, you can go beyond the 255 if needed. Also with the Web Client you could do this. If you are hitting this issue, please be aware that it is a known issue and VMware is looking to resolve it hopefully soon.
Server
Logitech Brio Webcam issues with autofocus and not retaining settings on Mac OSX
I have been using a Logitech Brio Webcam for the past year or so. It is a 4k Webcam which is very useful for webinars and meetings, especially as I run my Macbook with an external monitor and it is closed. Over the past 9 months or so I had a bunch of trouble with the Logitech Brio Webcam. This week I received a new Macbook and I had to reinstall all components, and immediately after I installed the Logitech software, all issues started popping up again. Auto Focus was just not working as expected, wide/standard view settings were not properly retained, and neither was the angle/width. I made sure I had the latest version of the software, the latest version of the firmware, but that didn’t solve any of the problems. Actually, it made things worse as now I had the camera randomly stopping as well, even had my Mac log me off randomly when using the camera. I solved all these issues by uninstalling ALL Logitech software. Yes, you read that correctly, I uninstalled all Logitech software and the Brio was usable again.
Unfortunately, this means that you can’t configure the Brio as you would wish, and it runs with the optimal/default settings, but at least it works. I was told that the Logitech G Hub software could potentially be a nice alternative. But after reading this thread on Reddit I decided I am going to skip that as well, as I don’t get a real comfortable feeling when reading all the comments. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to configure the webcam right now, if I find a solution to this problem I will make sure to update this post. You may ask, what would you need to configure? Well in my case I would like to configure the Webcam to use PAL instead of NTSC for the refresh rate, which removes some of the flickering I would be able to spot other wise. Unfortunately, not possible just yet without the software to my knowledge, or maybe one of you knows the answer to this problem? To conclude, I think it is fair to say that the Logitech hardware is great, but unfortunately, the software is not.
— UPDATE —
I just installed Logi Tune (2.1.24), it seems a bit better at the moment, I use the following settings:
- Autofocus – Disabled
- Manual focus – all the way to the left
- Auto Exposure – Disabled
- Exposure – Between 15 – 18% for me
- Brightness – 50%
- Contrast – 50%
- Saturation – 50%
- Sharpness – 100%
Sharing my vSAN 7.0 U1 webinar, watch it now!
I recorded a webinar a while back. It was streamed last week, and I figured that as I have the recording here, I may as well share it with you. In this webinar I discuss many of the new features which were introduced as part of vSAN 7.0 U1, features like HCI Mesh, IO Insight, enhanced File Service capabilities, and much more. The session is about 40 minutes long, but of course, the great thing about youtube is that you can play it at a different speed. Hope you will enjoy it! Click on the video below, or simply follow this link to youtube. Make sure to like the video, and subscribe to my channel as well!
How to login to the vCLS VMs!?
I was asked this question this week, how you can login to the vCLS VMs. Now before I share the video, I want to mention that I do not encourage people doing this, but as it is documented and supported I do want to provide a simple “how to” for how this works. If you want to login to the vCLS VM, maybe for troubleshooting if needed or for auditing, you can do so by SSH’ing first into your vCenter Server. When logged in to the vCenter Server you run the following command, which then returns the password, this will then allow you to login to the console of the vCLS VM. Again, I do not want to encourage you to do this. Either way, below you find the command for retrieving the password, and a short demo of me retrieving the password and logging in.
/usr/lib/vmware-wcp/decrypt_clustervm_pw.py
Which vSAN policy changes will trigger a rebuild?
A couple of years ago I did a VMworld session with Cormac and we discussed the top things everyone should know about vSAN. One of the items discussed was which policy changes would trigger a rebuild. We tested the various situations and documented them. Two weeks ago a question around this was asked on a VMware internal Slack channel so I shared our findings. Considering it is already a few years ago, I wanted to make sure that our documented findings were still valid, so I redid the tests.
Now before I provide a table with the findings, I just want to explain what I tested, what I did is I created a VM with a default policy. I dumped a bunch of random data on the two VMDKs attached to the VM, and I then changed the policy of the VM while the VM is running. After changing the policy I verified through the command-line, and UI, if a rebuild of the objects was occurring or not. In some cases a policy change does not require a rebuild, while in other cases it does. This, of course, depends on what is being changed within the policy, and what that means for the objects associated with the policy. Hopefully, you will find the below table useful.
| From | To | Resync |
|---|---|---|
| RAID-1 | RAID-1 with higher FTT | Yes |
| RAID-1 | RAID-1 with lower FTT | No |
| RAID-1 | RAID-5/6 | Yes |
| RAID-5/6 | RAID-1 | Yes |
| RAID-5 | RAID-6 | Yes |
| RAID-6 | RAID-5 | Yes |
| Stripe width 1 | Stripe width increase by 1 (or more) | Yes |
| Stripe width x | Stripe width decrease by 1 (or more) | Yes |
| Space Reservation 0 | Increase to larger than 0 | No |
| Space Reservation >= 1 | Increase by 1 (or more) | No |
| Space reservation > 0 | Decrease to 0 | No |
| Read Cache 0 | Increase to larger than 0 | No |
| Read Cache >= 1 | Increase by 1 (or more) | No |
| Read Cache >= 1 | Decrease by 1 (or more) | No |
| Checksum enabled | Checksum disabled | No |
| Checksum disabled | Checksum enabled | Yes |