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

Event ID 1000 rundll32.exe_aepdu.dll

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....

10 July, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Quick post: Bug in Veeam Quick Migration

Last week I was moving some VMs for a client using Veeam Quick Migration. During the migration, I happened to stumble upon some strange behavior. The source VMs make up an Oracle RAC cluster, using shared VMDKs. One of the requirements for setting up shared VMDKs, using the multi-writer option, is that they are thick eager zeroed disks. When the VMs got to the other side, they wouldn’t boot. I figured something went wrong during the migration so I tried it again....

20 September, 2017 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Publicly share Office 365 room calendar

A customer asked me if it was possible to have a room mailbox automatically accept meeting requests from external parties. They would also like to publish the calendar of that specific room publicly. Accept meetings from external parties Let’s start with the first question. By default, resource mailboxes only accept requests from internal senders. As you might guess, you can’t change this behavior through the GUI, Powershell to the rescue!...

7 April, 2017 · 3 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Cannot get extent connection. Failed to restore file from local backup

When I got into the office this morning, I noticed that on particular copy job hadn’t done its` job over the weekend. This particular job copies the daily restore points to a separate scale-out repository and enforces the GFS scheme that’s been set. The job report displayed Not that much to go on if you ask me. First, I checked to see if all extents in the repository still had enough room, this was the case....

6 March, 2017 · 1 min · Maarten Van Driessen