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.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if an ESXi host lost access to its boot disk? If you expect the host to throw a purple screen of death and all VMs to be restarted on another host by vSphere HA, you might be surprised to find that the host will continue to operate more or less as usual, and virtual machines …

With the release of PowerCLI 10 at the end of February, unless you read the release notes first, I’m pretty sure you’ll have seen the following error message at least once when trying to connect with Connect-VIServer:

I recently had a storage network outage in my lab environment, and after powering back on my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) I was rudely greeted with the following information at the console:

Ouch!  I’ve never dealt with file system corruption in a VCSA before, and the internet doesn’t seem to contain …

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 …

A vMSC - perhaps more commonly known as a “metro cluster” -  is an architecture in which individual vSphere clusters will be spread across multiple geographical sites.  Since a vSphere cluster requires shared storage to allow VM’s to migrate across hosts, in a vMSC environment this will mean that …

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. …