In this post I’ll run through the steps required to recover a vSAN disk group from a failed ESXi host running vSphere 6.7 U3. If you need to recover data from a vSAN datastore after a situation like an ESXi host has died but the vSAN disks are intact, read on.

Increasing the storage capacity on vRealize Log Insight is something that I get asked about fairly often, typically because a customer has a regulatory or business requirement to store log data for x number of weeks or months, and the customer still wants to be able to query the logs interactively. vRealize Log Insight …

The list of events and tasks that vCenter maintains for each object in the inventory are extremely useful for forensics analysis in a vSphere environment.  For identifying who created or deleted a VM, resized a vmdk, or shut down a VM or host, events and tasks are where you look. In its default state, however, the …

I recently needed to configure a number of NSX Controller nodes to forward their logs using syslog to a vRealize Log Insight cluster.  Unlike the NSX manager (and most other components of a VMware SDDC), NSX controllers don’t provide a graphical way of configuring syslog.  In fact, they don’t even offer a …

In yesterday’s post, I updated my VCSA 6.0 appliance to version 6.5.  Today, logged into the Appliance MUI and noticed that my appliance was not able to check for updates using the default web repository.

Before we really start, a quick note on terminology.  The Appliance MUI (which means Appliance Management UI) …

With today’s exciting release of VMware vSphere 6.5, I thought I’d celebrate by upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in my lab from version 6.0 u2 to version 6.5.  Since I’m doing this more or less blind, without having read any documentation whatsoever, I thought I would write a (hopefully …

This is an (extremely) quick post to cover the steps required to decommission a Platform Services Controller (PSC) or vCenter Server from the vSphere single-sign on (SSO) domain.  The steps below are for a VCSA; steps for a Windows VC are very similar, and are contained in the VMware KB article I used as a reference …

Here’s a quick guide on how to query and change the Platform Services Controller (PSC) being used by vCenter.  Querying for the in-use PSC is possible on vCenter 6.0, but changing the PSC is only possible on 6.0 Update 1 or newer.  Note that I performed these steps on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and …

As VMware continues to push in the direction of unix-based appliances for their vSphere management components, those without a Unix background (like myself) are having to come to grips with the Unix versions of common administrative tasks. Increasing the disk size on a vCenter Server appliance (VCSA) is one such task. …

Coming from a Windows background without much knowledge of Unix commands, I often find myself at a loss when trying to figure out how to do things on VMware’s vSphere appliances.  Managing disk space from the command line on an appliance is something I’ve had to do more than a few times, so I thought …