vCenter update fails: vCenter server is non-operational

Today, while I was updating vCenter in my lab, I ran into a strange issue. The update I was installing failed, when I wanted to try again, this ominous error message popped up. vCenter being non-operational left me a bit of a doom and gloom feeling but, thankfully, the fix is rather easy. Fixing the issue Open up an SSH session to your vCenter server and run the command below to remove the software_update_state....

4 September, 2020 · 1 min · Maarten Van Driessen

VCAP-DCV Deploy Exam Experience

After postponing this exam for too long, I finally took the time to study for and take the VCAP-DCV deploy exam. To be honest, I was kind of looking forward to this exam. I love playing in the lab and getting my hands dirty in an environment. So to be able to take an actual lab exam was pretty exciting to me. In this post, I will try to give some pointers and tips that might help you pass the exam....

23 August, 2020 · 5 min · Maarten Van Driessen

VCSA upgrade – deployment sizes missing

Everyone has done VCSA upgrades dozens of times, but every now and then you come across something that you haven’t seen before. Today, this was the case while I was doing an upgrade. When you get to the deployment size selection, in the first stage of the upgrade, I noticed I was unable to select anything smaller than “Medium” size. Changing the storage size also didn’t make the Tiny or small sizes available....

11 June, 2020 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Update ESXi fails with dependency error vmkapi_2_0_0_0

In the past few weeks, I’ve been in the process of updating several standalone ESXi hosts to 6.5. As you would expect, everything went smooth up to a certain point. Several hosts started failing and throwing this error: VIB LSI_bootbank_scsi-megaraid-perc9_6.901.55.00-1OEM.500.0.0.472560 requires vmkapi_2_0_0_0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile. VIB LSI_bootbank_scsi-mpt3sas_04.00.00.00.1vmw-1OEM.500.0.0.472560 requires com.vmware.driverAPI-9.2.0.0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile. The entire error is shown below....

4 December, 2019 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

VMworld recap

The saying goes “time flies when you’re having fun” and boy was that true at VMworld! I had heard a lot of stories about VMworld and have been wanting to go for ages. Sadly, I never got the opportunity to actually go until this year! As always, I entered to win a blogger pass and this year it actually worked out 🙂 Thanks again to Corey Romero and the team for giving me this opportunity....

23 November, 2019 · 4 min · Maarten Van Driessen

How to reset iLO password from ESXi

Everyone’s been here before, you know the iLO password should be set to something, only to find out that on just this one server the password is different. There are several ways to reset the iLO password; you could reboot the server and reset it that way. But who likes planning downtime on a server for a password reset? Luckily you find that the server is an ESXi host that was installed using the HPE customized image....

18 October, 2019 · 3 min · Maarten Van Driessen

VMUGBE

Next week, the 14th of June, it’s time for one of my favorite times of the year, the yearly VMUGBE is upon us! It’s an amazing day filled with great sessions, good conversations, all set in a lovely venue. The Belgian VMUG was the first VMUG I ever attended, 4 years ago already. It’s where I met a lot of people I know in the community and, on a personal level, where I learned to just go up to random people and start talking to them....

5 June, 2019 · 3 min · Maarten Van Driessen

VCAP6.5-DCV Design Exam Experience

This year, I got the opportunity to go to VMware Empower 2019 in Lisbon. The ticket includes a free exam voucher so I used it to take my VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. I’m glad to say that I passed! The exam was a lot harder than I expected though. Having just done the VCP exams, I did not expect the VCAP to be that much harder. In this post, I will try to share some tips that I found useful during preparation and how I experienced the exam...

22 May, 2019 · 4 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Rescanning ESXi storage in a parallel way

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work provisioning and decommissioning LUNs on some Fibre Channel arrays. As you all know, this process can be somewhat tedious when provisioning a new LUN on vSphere or removing said LUN. In the past, I would always use this PowerCLI command Get-VMhost -Cluster "Cluster1" | Get-VMHostStorage -Refresh This would first get all the ESXi hosts in the cluster “Cluster1” and then launch the refresh cmdlet on each host....

13 December, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

ERROR: The host returns esxupdate error code:15

Today I was preparing some updates with VUM on Lenovo servers running vSphere 6.0. Things did not go as expected. While staging the patches I was greeted with this error. ERROR: The host returns esxupdate error code:15. The package manager transactions is not successful. Check the update Manager log files and esxupdate.log files for more details. Looking into the esxupdate.log file I could find the following entries: 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: BootBankInstaller....

11 October, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen