Paul Bryant Have you ever had someone do a restore of a backup to your vSAN cluster? Ever find it annoying that it does a non-vSAN policy and spits health errors in your vSAN Health check? Ever find it annoying when this new VM is Thick provisioned and 99% of the time it can be thin provisioned? … Read more
Recently, I was approached by someone who wasn’t fully familiar with VMWare. They quick ask was how do I get email alerts when our ESXi hosts go offline. It took a few minutes to confirm they had an email server setup and then to walk them through how to edit alarms to send emails when … Read more
Sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where a vSAN object Storage Policy Compliance status will become Out of Date. To resolve this you must go to the VM object and Reapply VM Storage Policy. Why you may get this error:The compliance status for a virtual machine is Out of Date. The status indicates … Read more
Sometimes you will need to confirm that a VM is in compliance with it’s Storage Policy. Please find below that three ways to confirm if your VM is in compliance with the mandated VM Storage Policies. First way – bottom of the VM summary page To update the check just click check compliance Second way … Read more
When you stand up a new cluster you may have storage requirements besides just the default vSAN storage policy. Since the screens have change slightly 🙂 between 6.5 and 6.7 update 3 I thought I would take a moment for a high level walk through of creating a new storage policy. Go to Menu > … Read more
Recently, I was attempting to place a ESXi host into maintenance mode via the GUI in vCenter. However, it kept failing even after i restarted services and rebooted the vCenter. This forced me to break out some old commands to perform this task via CLI on the ESXi host itself. Confirm the host is not … Read more
I must admit I have not added a new non-internal management pack to vROPs since 6.x. I thought I would take a moment to write a refresher article and maybe help those who are attempting to do it for the first time. I hope y’all find this article useful. Step 1. Get to add mgmt … Read more
Ping has been a powerful tool for windows/linux/VMWare guys for a long time in troubleshooting network connectivity. VMkping is ping for vmk traffic. You execute the vmkping command from the ESXi host so you will need SSH services enabled. Below I will dust off some old vmkping commands I still use today to help me … Read more
Recently, I got to see something I haven’t had to experience in a while. I had a VM that wouldn’t power down in the GUI even after I vMotion it to another host. I had to go back into my old school archive for the procedure of bringing down a VM via CLI from the … Read more
This year I have been fortunate enough to be made a vExpert for my second straight year. I was asked what does it mean to me to be a vExpert, so I thought I would take a moment to write a blog article on what it means to me to be a vExpert. The Beginning:To … Read more
Have you ever been upgrading VxRail and the composite bundle upload stalls at 66% during the unpacking composite bundle bootstrap? It happened to me recently. Here is a quick fix that has worked for me in the past I wanted to share. However; I cannot stress enough that if you are not experienced enough or … Read more
A requirement to deploy a VxRail cluster is to create a VxRail management user and password on your vCenter Server. The password for this user does expire in VxRail manager. The fix for this is quick and painless but VxRail Manager informs you when the password has expired and mutes health monitoring services until you … Read more
In my last article I showed how to upgrade from 4.5 to 4.7. In this article I thought I would make a quick guide from upgrading from 4.7.x to 4.7.x since DellEMC’s documentation is a little off. Now with the VxRail Manager plug-in capability in vCenter it does finally feel a like a single pane … Read more
Recently I was speaking with a close friend who was surprised to hear with all the technical reading I do that I also make time for leisure reading. Now I must admit that my leisure reading still aligns with IT but he was surprised at the types of technology books that make my reading list. … Read more
I just completed my AZ-900 exam with a score of 876. I thought I would put together my own guide of how I approached studying for the exam. I hope y’all find this information useful. Free Training:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/azure-fundamentals/ Paid Training:https://acloud.guru/learn/az-900-microsoft-azure-fundamentals Great Blog Article by Vlad Catinescuhttps://vladtalkstech.com/az-900-study-guide-microsoft-azure-fundamentals A good buddy Nathan Bennett asked me for my study … Read more
This is my first part of a series of career advice & tips I’ve been asked to write. I’ve been surprised as I attend summits, conferences, and events how many people ask me for career advice instead of technical advice. I thought it would be best to start with a topic many people tell me … Read more
Have you ever needed to execute a change control but leadership is concerned about off hours work impacting offshore team. Wouldn’t it be awesome if in a matter of a minute in vROPs you could see your cluster utilization? I know there are plenty of ways to gather this information from a multitude of tools … Read more
Role and career pre-HCI & SDDC I was fortunate when I began my career to have EMC as my first employer. At the time EMC was known as the storage giant in IT. I began my career in support but shared an office with the local Pre-Sales teams. This gave me a great insight into … Read more
Have you ever seen widgets from different dashboards you wanted to combine into a new custom dashboard? Do you also not want to waste time recreating the wheel? If the answers to these questions are yes then here is a step by step cheat I use leveraging copy/paste of widgets to generate quick custom dashboards. … Read more
This will be a quick article since it is really easy. I have had someone reach out to me recently after explaining to them how to copy and paste widgets. They do not have admin access and informed me that there was a shared dashboard they wanted to edit to perform the copy job from. … Read more
