Upgrade vSphere 4 Environment to vSphere 5
KB ID 0000543 Problem I will probably have a ton of these to do next year! The following process runs right through the entire migration process of vCenter, the ESX/ESXi hosts, The Datastores, The VM Tools, VMHardware, and finally re licencing everything with your new vSphere 5 keys. Solution Step 1 Verify your Software and Hardware Requirements 1. vCenter 5 Hardware Requirements: CPU: Requires Dual CPU (At least 2GHz – IA64...
VMware ESXi – Converting ‘Thick’ Provisioned Drives to ‘Thin’, and ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick’
KB ID 0000579 Problem Thin provisioning of hard drives is pretty cool stuff, full support for thin provisioning was brought in with vSphere version 4. Put simply a thin proviosioned drive is as big as it needs to be, and a thick provisioned drive is set to its maximum size when it’s created. The virtual machines that use these hard drives don’t know, and assume that their hard drive is a set size (even if it is thin...
VMware ESXi 5 – Applying Patches and Updates
(ESXi 5 Update 1 and Patches) KB ID 0000623 Problem When VMware released ESX 4.1, they took away the “Host update utility”, (which was a mistake!). For people without VMware Update Manager, you now have to either put in the CD/DVD and do an ‘in place upgrade’, or grow a ginger pony tail and put some socks/sandals on and do some Linux. Below I’ve got a build of ESX with no updates on it, I’m going to...
VMware VI Client – Remove Cached IP addresses and Hostnames
KB ID 0000644 Problem If you connect to a lot of ESX, ESXi and vCenter machines, the drop down list in your VI client can get a little cluttered. Solution 1. Start > Run > Regedit {enter} 2. Navigate to; HKEY_CURRENT_CURRENT_USERSoftwareVMwareVMware Infrastructure ClientPreferences Locate the ‘RecentConnections’ string value, and either delete them all, (or just the ones you no longer need). 3. Now things will be a...
vSphere – Floppy Drive ‘Won’t Appear’
KB ID 0001020 Problem “It’s 2015 why are you messing around with floppy drives?” I hear you ask! Well for importing certificate requests, and issued certificates from an offline root CA server, it’s still considered best practice to use a virtual floppy drive rather than connect the offline root server to the production network. So today while deploying a PKI infrastructure, I needed to present a floppy drive...