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. Please note that I took the exam for the 6.5 version but the same logic applies to other versions. ...

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. While I was doing this, I happened to be talking to Jens Herremans (Check out his blog, it’s awesome!). He told me to check the size of the logs partition on the source VM. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. This is good news as you can now use the HPONCFG tool to reset the password! ...

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. Something I’m still not very good at but there’s plenty of VMUGs to come! ...

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 ...

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. The problem with this is that it can take a really long time for the command to complete because the refresh is executed host by host. Before starting the next refresh, the command waits for the previous one to finish. While this is fine for smaller environments, the time really does add up when you have a decent sized cluster. ...

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.pyc: ERROR: The pending transaction requires 242 MB free space, however the maximum supported size is 239 MB. 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: An esxupdate error exception was caught: 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: Traceback (most recent call last): 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/usr/sbin/esxupdate", line 238, in main 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: cmd.Run() 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/build/mts/release/bora-5572656/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib/python2.7/site-packages/vmware/esx5update/Cmdline.py", line 148, in Run 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/build/mts/release/bora-5572656/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib/python2.7/site-packages/vmware/esximage/Transaction.py", line 250, in InstallVibsFromSources ...

While doing my morning check of our monitoring system I came across a strange issue…Two of our servers had been unavailable during the night, this had also happened the night before. Time to dig a bit deeper! Both servers are domain controllers running Server 2012 R2, no updates were installed in the last few weeks and nothing had been changed either. Pulling up the event log of both servers, I found the exact same event logged on both machines at the time they were unavailable to our monitoring system. ...