A few weeks ago I had to shutdown a vSAN Cluster temporarily for a planned site-wide 24 hour power outage that was blacking out a datacentre. With the amount of warning and a multi-datacentre design this wasn’t an issue, but I made use of vSphere tags and some Powershell/PowerCLI to help with the evacuation and …

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Or “How I’ve come to love my vSAN Ready Nodes”
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Ladies and Gentlemen of VMworld 2019.

Wear comfortable shoes.

If I could offer you only one tip for the conference, comfy shoes would be it.

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For several years vSphere admins have been able to use the Log Insight tool for free as a “25 OSI” license was included in vCenter. This has meant that deployments of up to 24 hosts (plus vCenter) have been able to use the VMware tool as a syslog server and troubleshooting tool without having to purchase further …
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In the process of upgrading a vSAN ReadyNode cluster from ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 a warning appeared in the vSAN Health check. The first host in the cluster had gone through the upgrade and was now showing the warning “Controller driver is VMware certified” (Note 1 in the image below). The Dell HBA330 card was using an older …
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It was announced this week that registration for VMware’s VMworld 2019 conference will open at the beginning of May so now seems a good time to look at some of the key dates for the event.
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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 …
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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)”.
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In two weeks I’ll be heading up to the annual UK VMware User Group meeting. This year a later VMworld Europe has pushed this conference’s date into Christmas season from it’s usual home in November and, speaking of homes, it’s relocated from the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham to the National Space …
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