Keith Smith - My Blog : VMware

VMware Ports and Protocols

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 21:40:13 +0000

While doing some research for vCenter ports I found this gem https://ports.vmware.com/home/vSphere a database of ports and protocols for VMware products. This site is definitely worth a bookmark in your browser of choice.

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Unitrends to Nakivo

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 22:02:31 +0000

Six years ago I was still using LTO tapes as a primary backup method with backup exec to backup several terabytes of data from various servers. Some of the backups would take days to complete; some would complete successfully while others would complete with errors and on the flip side the recovery of data would take even longer than the backups would conclude with the high chance that the one wouldn't be able to recover anything at all. It was well past time to move from tapes to a D2D for backups; I started performing bake off's between may products at the time.

The unitrends solution beat all the other D2D solutions by a wide margin, one of the many things that I liked about unitrends was that they didn't charge per client and they had an appliance that they had built and would support. As time had progressed the unitrends solution started to show it's age and has become very costly at renewal time, this is something that I've experienced multiple times as I've implemented the solution at many organizations.

The renewal costs have pushed many customers to go back to the drawing board (as a lot of customers had built their entire DR/BC plans around the unitrends solution) and evaluate other solutions. The unitrends solution had been a go-to for me for a long time when it came to designing DR/BC architecture; I now find myself saying goodbye to the unitrends solution in favor of the Nakivo for a D2D solution. The Nakivo backup and recovery solution is entirely web-based and comes as a virtual appliance, a package on a NAS or can be installed on a server you provision running *nix or windows.

I've found the transition to quite pleasant, the support has been very knowledgeable, and the administration has been straightforward to navigate.

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An error occurred while consolidating disks: One or more disks busy

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 08:55:14 +0000

We've all encountered the dreaded error "An error occurred while consolidating disks: One or more disks are busy" when trying to consolidate virtual machines in vmware.

To resolve this vmware has published articles like http://https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2150414 but for me I found that simply shutting down the VM and the vCenter server seems to allow the consolidation process to complete when connecting to the hosts box directly via the vcenter client. I figured I take a few minutes to write this up since it may help someone else.

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Google Chrome Shockwave Flash crashed

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 04:21:54 +0000

Google put out an update over the a few days ago that patched a few things but they also somehow managed to update their embedded flash to a newer version than even Adobe Flash offers.

Rebooting your computer and or your vcenter will not solve this issue.

Try navigating to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash in Windows and you should see a folder called 27.0.0.170 – this is the new Flash distribution. You should also see a folder called 27.0.0.159 and all you have to do is deleted the 27.0.0.170 folder and be on your way. Some people have had to copy the contents from 27.0.0.159 into 27.0.0.170 and have had success that way.

Another work around would be to use another browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, etc.) to access vcenter. It’s been a tough month for patching, test when you can and always have contingency plan in case things don’t work as expected.

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How to import the VCSA certificate for VMware vSphere

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 07:55:31 +0000

How to import the VCSA certificate so VMware vSphere browser security warnings go away in Windows 10

Open the Edge or google chrome Brower, type in the FQDN for your VCSA 6.5 then press enter, when warned, click 'Details'.
Bypass the security warning in order to proceed to the Getting Started page of the VCSA
Click on 'Download trusted root CA certificates' on the right to download the zip file which contains the certs
Navigate to the zip file location, extract the contents of the zip. Open the folder downloads folder then go into certs
The certs vary by what OS you are using so choose the right folder then double-click 'filename.0.crt' (your exact filename will vary)
Click 'Install Certificate' and choose local machine (Note: If you get any prompts click yes to proceed)
On the certificate store screen choose place all certifications in the following store and click browse
Select 'Trusted Root Certification Authorities' then click 'OK'
Click next and then finish then ok.

Now to test it close the browser then visit the FQDN for your VCSA 6.5 you should see the green pad lock now and shouldn’t see the security warning any longer.

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