vSphere: Presenting Physical Disks to a VM
KB ID 0001563 Problem I’m doing some work presenting StarWind vSAN into VMware ESX. Because we also want ‘disk tiering’ it has to be ran from Microsoft Windows with Storage Spaces*. To do that I needed to present the physical disks in the ESX hosts, (HP DL380 Gen 10s) to the Windows Virtual Machines that StarWind will be running on. *Note: At present, ‘tiering’ cannot be done from the StarWind Linux...
Veeam: Restore/Migrate vSphere VM to Hyper-V
KB ID 0001559 Problem I saw this question asked on EE the other day, and while I’ve done Migrating from vSphere to Microsoft before, I’ve never really tried with Veeam. Migrating and Restoring vSphere Machines to Azure is easy, but what about Hyper-V? Solution Veeam Backup and Recovery Download Natively with Veeam Backup and Restore, the only way to do this, is to perform an Agent Based backup of your VMware VM. If you are...
VMware: Fiber Channel HBA Reports Wrong WWN?
KB ID 0001534 Problem I was building some new ESX 6.7 U1 (HPE) servers this week, they had Emulex Fiber HBA’s in them. When it came to ‘allowing’ them access to the SAN, I went to get the Port World Wide Name; And was presented with this; Not only is that 19 Characters long, and not 16 characters, but BOTH VMHBA’s WERE THE SAME! Like MAC addresses they should be unique? So I’m guessing this is a bug....
Disable ATS Heartbeat
KB ID 0001529 Problem After ESX 5.5 Update 2, VMware added ATS Heartbeat.Some vendors, (like HPE SureStore and VSA) recommend that this is disabled. I can’t find any info about whether it’s safe to do this in production, so to be on the safe side I placed the hosts in maintenance mode first. Enter Maintenance Mode Use the following command; vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter Disable ATS Heartbeat Use the following...
Virtual SAN: Suppress ‘Datastore Usage on Disk’ Alarm
KB ID 0001527 Problem While deploying a HPE StoreVirtual VSA this week. We noticed all the local Datastore were showing an ‘Alarm’. If you are unfamiliar with Virtual SANs, then you give all the LOCAL Storage to them, which then gets ‘aggregated’ and provided back to the host(s) as fault tolerant clustered storage, like so; Which is great, but the VMware hosts just see that their LOCAL Datastore(s) are full,...
VMware ‘Disable DelayedAck’ Does Not Work?
KB ID 0001525 Problem I’ve got a client that’s been having some performance issues with their VMs. Their storage vendor, (EMC) said that as a result of finding this in the logs; B 02/28/19 09:50:53.953 scsitarg 117000e [INFO] System: iSCSI Logout Initiator Data: IP=192.168.200.161 Name=…-ec-21 Target Data: Port=2 Flags=0x00002002 Info=0x01200801 B 02/28/19 09:50:53.969 scsitarg 117000e...
Manually Extracting VMware Tools Drivers
KB ID 0001518 Problem If you want to get hold of the actual drivers from VMware tools, e.g. to have them in a machine that you will be deploying into VMware ESX/Workstation etc, then this is how to do it. Solution I’m using WinSCP to connect to one of my ESXi servers, (it’s free, and just works!) From the root directory locate vminages and open that. Tools-isoimages, (this might seem long-winded, but if you keep an eye on...
Veeam: Restore / Migrate a VM to Azure
KB ID 0001511 Problem Veeam is both a great company, and backup and recovery is the best product in its class by a country mile, (yes Zerto is great but it costs a fortune!) With Backup and Recovery 9.5 Update 4. You can recover a VM straight into Azure, (and Azure Stack). Which pretty much means you can use Veeam to Migrate your VMs (or physical machines) from vCenter (or Hyper-V) into Azure/Azure Stack. You need to have a successful...
Migrate a VM from vCenter to Azure
KB ID 0001510 Problem Last time we looked at migrating from vCenter to Hyper-V, now we will use the MVMC (Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter) to take a VMware (vCenter) virtual machine and convert/upload it to Microsoft Azure. Note: MVMC is not ‘officially’ supported and this procedure requires you to create some ‘legacy’ (for legacy in Azure read ‘classic’) ways of doing things. So this might not...
Convert VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs
KB ID 0001509 Problem OK, I love VMware, vSphere has put food on my table for the past 10 years! But the fact remains plenty of people are now using Hyper-V. Recently I’ve been looking at migrating VMs from VMware into Azure, and while looking at the MVMC (Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter), to do the task, I thought I’d run thought the Hyper-V conversion route first. MVMC has actually been depreciated now, but you can...