During a recent consolidation prospect I was faced with the challenge of migrated encrypted VMs from one vCenter to another.

This week VMware announced that VMware Tools – the agent that sits on the guest operating system is now a separate product. This means that it’s subject to its own product lifecycle, and admins can modify their approach to keeping tools updated. It’s all grown up, and got a home of it’s own.

By joining PowerCLI to interrogate a VMware vSphere environment and the Webhook API to post Microsoft Teams messages, we can send informational reports on the state of a virtual environment to channels in Teams.

Troubleshooting a vMotion error.

If you’re running VMware vCenter and ESXi 6.0 it’s time to start planning to upgrade as General Support ends on 12 March 2020- one year from now and five years from it’s release. Thankfully the upgrade from 6.0 to 6.5 or 6.7 is usually quite straightforward, and VMware have put a lot of work into …

A powered off VM on ESXi 6.5 will not power on and returns the error “Failed to power on virtual machine…. The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered off)”.

There’s an ever growing variety of NSX flavours as VMware expands the range of their Network Virtualisation and security platforms. A recent podcast highlighted these to me, and I thought it worth summarising here in a quick post.

Symptoms

• vCenter (in my case VCSA 6.5 ) is not sending alert emails even though the mail server appears to be configured properly (in the vSphere Web Client this is on the vCenter node under Configure, Settings, General).
• Network connectivity between vCenter and port 25 on the SMTP server is fine and has been tested.

I’m using vSphere Replication to replicate a number of VMs to a datastore which is being decommissioned. I can’t reconfigure replication by code (I’ve mentioned that there’s no public API or PowerCLI around the vSphere Replication functionality in vSphere 6.5 before- most recently on Twitter) …

A quick note on an issue I spotted in VMware vSphere 6.5 when creating a new content Library.