vSphere: Migrating vSwitch PortGroups and VLANS
Jul30

vSphere: Migrating vSwitch PortGroups and VLANS

KB ID 0001578 Problem Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some work for a client that involves me adding some new ESX hosts. These will be setup the same as their existing ESX hosts. That’s fine, but they use standard vSwitches and have A LOT of port groups and VLANs. I could sit and create them all manually, and tag them onto the the correct VLANs, but something that’s boring and repetitive is better solved with...

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Veeam: ‘Failed to open disk for read’
Jul29

Veeam: ‘Failed to open disk for read’

KB ID 0001577 Problem EVERY VMware Job in Veeam Backup and Recovery failed with the following error, (for every Guest VM); Processing SERVER-NAME Error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[DATASTORE-NAME] SERVER-NAME/SERVER-NAME.vmdk] ( is read-only mode – [true] ) Logon attempt with parameters [VC/ESX: [ESXi-SERVER-NAME.DOMAIN-NAME.COM];Port: 443;Login: [administrator@.vsphere.local];VMX Spec: [moref=vm-231];Snapshot mor:...

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VMware: Upgrade Errors
Jul29

VMware: Upgrade Errors

KB ID 0001576 Problem This weekend I had to upgrade some servers from VMware 5.5 to version 6U3, (that’s the latest supported version, on the hardware I was using: HP BL460c). As the VC was at version 6.5 I couldn’t use the built in update manager, so I had to use the ‘offline bundle’ method.  TWO THINGS then jumped up and bit me; Problem 1 [DependencyError] File path of ‘etc/init.d/hp-mst.init’ is...

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Cisco SFR Cant Ping its Default Gateway?
Jul25

Cisco SFR Cant Ping its Default Gateway?

KB ID 0001575 Problem This is a strange one? I was deploying FirePOWER to a pair of ASA 5550-8-X firewalls in Active / Standby failover last week. After each SFR was updated (via ASDM.) I could no longer ‘ping it’, the SFR itself could ping everything on the same VLAN, APART from its own default gateway, (which was an SVI on the Cisco 3750 switch it was connected to). This happened every time I updated the SFR, (or...

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Load Balance IIS with Microsoft ARR
Jul05

Load Balance IIS with Microsoft ARR

KB ID 0001573 Problem If you have a lot of IIS servers, and want to load balance between them, then you can either buy a load balancer, or use Microsoft ARR (Application Request Routing). Note: ARR does a lot more than simply load balancing, e.g. it can perform caching, and complex web routing, and even SSL offloading. Here we are just looking at load balancing. I’m going to deploy TWO ARR servers in my DMZ, here I’ve got...

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