Reading Time: < 1 minute According with Product Lifecycle Matrix and KB 89305, VMware has officially declared, vSphere 6.5.x and vSphere 6.7.x will be End of General Support by October 15th 2022. To maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 7.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The file-level backup feature introduced in vCSA 6.5 is very powerfull and schedulable (starting with vCSA 6.7) because sometimes the image-level backup may not provide the proper integrity if you have corrupted files inside the VM. Also with vSphere 7.0 is possible monitoring the status of the file-level backup directly from vSphere Client and this is quite usefull to have this information direct visible from the UI:
Reading Time: 2 minutes There is a big issue in vCenter Server, with sensitive information disclosure vulnerability in the VMware Directory Service (vmdir). Under certain conditions vmdir that ships with VMware vCenter Server, as part of an embedded or external Platform Services Controller (PSC), does not correctly implement access controls.
Reading Time: 2 minutes A usual way to backup the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is to manage as a common VM and use a backup solution to backup (and restore) the entire VM. But it’s approach does not always work and cannot guarantee a restore in some cases, for example in the case of a database corruption.
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is an article realized for StarWind blog and focused on the design and architecture of VMware vCenter and PSC topologies. See the original post. You can “federate” multiple vCenter Server systems using vCenter Linked Mode (introduced in vSphere 4.0) to build a single pane of glass and share information between vCenter instances, like view and manage the inventories of all the vCenter Server systems that are linked.
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you still are using the Windows based vCenter Server with a SQL Server database you may have some login issues, due to a recent Windows update (released on July 10, 2018). You will have some errors in the SQL Server part with SQL startup issues due to “TCP port is already in use” errors. This is caused by a regression in the TCP/IP functions that manages the TCP port pool introduced in the July 10, 2018 Windows updates for Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8.1/Server 2012 R2.
Reading Time: 3 minutes One common way to backup the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is to manage as a common VM and use a backup solution to backup (and restore) the entire VM. But it’s approach does not always work, for example in the case of a database corruption the VM restore could be not working. Starting with vSphere 6.5 and the new VCSA 6.5 was possible to use also a native backup solution integrated with the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI). But it was a manual operation (some scripts are available to automate and schedule it).
Reading Time: 2 minutes VMware vSphere 6.5 it’s quite popolar now, considering the deadline for the version 5.5 in this year and the direct upgrade path from v5.5 to v6.5. But maybe not everybody want to update vSphere 6.5 to Update 2, considering that there will be no upgrade path (yet) to version 6.7 and maybe other minor issues due to the backport of some features.
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware has released (on Feb, 15th) a new vCSA version: vCenter Server 6.5 U1f, with build number 7801515. This release patches the vCSA operating system (Photon OS) mainly against two vulnerabilities: bounds-check bypass (Spectre-1, CVE-2017-5753) and rogue data cache load issues (Meltdown, CVE-2017-5754). As of now, there is still no patch for branch target injection vulnerability (Spectre-2, CVE-2017-5715). VMware has also updated the security advisory dealing with all of its virtual appliances updates for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, VMSA-2018-0007. But note that VMSA-2018-0004.2 has not been updated yet, and it still report that the suggested version for […]
Reading Time: 9 minutes This is an article realized for StarWind blog and focused on the pro and cons of an upgrade to vSphere 6.5. See also the original post. VMware vSphere 6.5 is the latest version of the enterprise server virtual platform from VMware, but the new beta it’s already there for testers. Actually the next version it’s (in the beta) and you can register at https://secure.vmware.com/43478_vSphere_Beta_Reg.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Note that this post has an updated version (Is the HTML5-based vSphere Client finally mature?) and become obsolete with the vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release where the client it’s finally complete. VMware vSphere, during its history and the different versions, has got several types of GUI clients. One of the most used (not the first, but the standard one since Virtual Infrastructure 3.0) was the vSphere Client for Windows. But on May 2016 VMware has announced that the Legacy C# Client (aka thick client, desktop client, or vSphere Client) will no longer be available with […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes VMware vSphere 6.0 has got some issues, like the several related to CBT and data protection, during the first years of its life. Mostly is finally resolved, but you may still have strange issuesespecially during the upgrade procedure (most when you start from a vSphere 5.1 version). I notice, after an upgrade, also a strange behavior with vMotion where live VM migration fails with this error: A general system error occurred: PBM error occurred during PreMigrateCheckCallback: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
Reading Time: 4 minutes VMware vCenter Server is a critical component in a vSphere environment, because is needed to provide some cluster functionality. A good design and deployment (that are different from version 5.x and 6.0) are important to avoid possible issues. And, of couse, a good availability of this kind of service. Troubleshoot this component is not always simple and there are a lot of VMware KB articles, but not a good single resource from where start in this kind of tasks. The purpose of this book is really clear from the title itself (vCenter troubleshooting) and the […]
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