So then! of late my attention has been drawn to Cloud Credibility which is a fantastic place to help validate your own and others cloud expertise by completing various tasks.

Among other things it encourages you to read up on white papers, carry out lab work ( Hands-on-labs ), watch training and informational materials and thus rewarding you with points for you and your team. What is also great is points really do mean prizes!

Updating vCenter Server certificates has always been a pain - it has only got worse with the sheer number of services that are running under vSphere 5.1 - each service requiring a unique certificate and to be installed in many complex steps.

Fortunately , with the release of the SSL Certificate Automation Tool, VMware have gone some way to reducing the headache.

Gather all the components you need

OpenSSL installer: http://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html  (I downloaded “Win32 OpenSSL v0.9.8y Light”, even though it’s a 64-bit server)

As some of you read previously, I had been experiencing disk latency issues on our SAN and tried many initial methods to troubleshoot and understand the root cause. Due to other more pressing issues this was placed aside until we started to experience VMs being occasionaly restarted by vSphere HA as the lock had been lost on a given VMDK file. (NOT GOOD!!)

The Environment:-

I’ve previously posted around this topic as part of another problem but having had to figure out the process again I think it’s worth re-posting a proper script for this. VMware KB 1016106 is snappily titled “ESXi/ESX hosts with visibility to RDM LUNs being used by MSCS nodes with RDMs may take a long time to boot or during LUN rescan” and describes the situation where booting ESXi (5.1 in my case) takes a huge amount of time to boot because it’s attempting to gain a SCSI reservation on an RDM disk used by MS Clustering Services. It also details the fix.

The voting is now open for your favourite VMware virtulization blogs over at vmware-land.com

With 200+ blogs now up and running with content covering every aspect from PowerCLI to VDI, technical deepdives and general VMware topical blogging! there is a very strong chance you will have read an article in at least a few of them.

This article originally started off life as a record of how I managed to get this working, as a lot of my posts do, but this time it appears I am foiled.

Last week, I had 3 vCenter Servers that appeared to be happily talking to each other in Linked Mode sharing a singe Multi-site SSO domain without any real issues. I had a single-pane-of-glass view of all 3 and I could manage them all from the one client. The reason for the 3 vCenter servers was segregation of LAN and DMZ networks: vCenter001 was in the LAN, vCenter002 sat in DMZ1 and vCenter003 sat in DMZ2.

Today while creating new VMs from a template I got the error “the server fault invalidargument had no message” when editing the VM settings, the settings were modified successfully but the error was present whether a change had been made or not to the settings of the VM.

A quick search of the web suggested removing said VM from the inventory and re-adding from the datastore, for many this fixed the issue but not for me.

Had a strange one after deploying an XP VM from a template today - the VM would not power on and threw the following error:

An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM [VM name].

cpuid.coresPerSocket must be a number between 1 and 8

Digging around on google the error seemed to be related to over-allocating vCPUs (e.g. assigning 8 vCPUs on a VM with 4 physical CPU cores). This was a single vCPU machine on a 12 processor host, so not likely to be that! It did give me the idea that maybe the VMX had an error, so I edited the VM hardware and added an extra CPU and saved the config. I then edited it back to a single CPU and powered on the machine - it worked!

So VMware’s Support Assistant is pretty awesome and it’s free! I thought I’d do a quick run through of the installation and set up for anyone who was interested, it’s fairly straightforward and if you raise a lot of calls or have multiple calls on the go it’s a time saver!

VMware’s official page for the Support Assistant is here - https://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-support-assistant/overview.html

The OVF deploy is so simple I’ve just taken screenshots:

I’m very pleased to say that as of 21st December, I passed my VCP510 exam and am now VCP5 qualified! It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time (since VCP3) but have never been able to get funding for the required course. My current employer sent me on the vSphere 5 Fast Track course earlier this year, so I was all set to take the exam.