In this post I’ll run through the steps required to recover a vSAN disk group from a failed ESXi host running vSphere 6.7 U3. If you need to recover data from a vSAN datastore after a situation like an ESXi host has died but the vSAN disks are intact, read on.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if an ESXi host lost access to its boot disk? If you expect the host to throw a purple screen of death and all VMs to be restarted on another host by vSphere HA, you might be surprised to find that the host will continue to operate more or less as usual, and virtual machines …

Increasing the storage capacity on vRealize Log Insight is something that I get asked about fairly often, typically because a customer has a regulatory or business requirement to store log data for x number of weeks or months, and the customer still wants to be able to query the logs interactively. vRealize Log Insight …

With the release of PowerCLI 10 at the end of February, unless you read the release notes first, I’m pretty sure you’ll have seen the following error message at least once when trying to connect with Connect-VIServer:

Hi everyone!

If you’re reading this, you probably saw my Getting started with vRA presentation at the Sydney VMUG earlier tonight.  I hope you found something useful in the short 20-30 minute timeslot I had to work with.  Delivering some useful content without blowing the time constraint was my biggest challenge, …

The list of events and tasks that vCenter maintains for each object in the inventory are extremely useful for forensics analysis in a vSphere environment.  For identifying who created or deleted a VM, resized a vmdk, or shut down a VM or host, events and tasks are where you look. In its default state, however, the …

I recently needed to configure a number of NSX Controller nodes to forward their logs using syslog to a vRealize Log Insight cluster.  Unlike the NSX manager (and most other components of a VMware SDDC), NSX controllers don’t provide a graphical way of configuring syslog.  In fact, they don’t even offer a …

I recently had a storage network outage in my lab environment, and after powering back on my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) I was rudely greeted with the following information at the console:

Ouch!  I’ve never dealt with file system corruption in a VCSA before, and the internet doesn’t seem to contain …

In yesterday’s post, I updated my VCSA 6.0 appliance to version 6.5.  Today, logged into the Appliance MUI and noticed that my appliance was not able to check for updates using the default web repository.

Before we really start, a quick note on terminology.  The Appliance MUI (which means Appliance Management UI) …

With today’s exciting release of VMware vSphere 6.5, I thought I’d celebrate by upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in my lab from version 6.0 u2 to version 6.5.  Since I’m doing this more or less blind, without having read any documentation whatsoever, I thought I would write a (hopefully …