While updating VMware ESXi servers, VMware vSphere users may encounter the “No space left on device” error that pops up while executing “esxcli software vib update” command. Interestingly, the problem occurs even though disks are doing well and have enough free space and df -h command proves that.
One day, any VMware administrator may require the so-called “support bundle” which contains log-files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics. Taken together, these parameters allow troubleshooting VMware vSphere. The bundle provides VMware GSS (Global Support Services) the insight into virtualized environment configuration which allows them to resolve issues, when a client submits a support ticket with this bundle attached.
Apart from that, the bundle comes in handy, for example, while analyzing the reasons of the “pink screen of death” (PSOD) in ESXi environment and other errors.
This article discusses retrieving the support bundle for VMware vCenter servers (be it Windows or vCenter Server Appliance, vCSA) and VMware ESXi.
Before we go deeper, here’s a small note: the support bundle can bloat to 300 MB, depending on what it contains, the frequency of infrastructure configuration changes, and how long ago the last change has been made.
Throughout the last month, VMware has released two important updates for virtual infrastructure management server – VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1d and 1e. Both updates have significantly improved the functionality of the vCenter management server, despite it’s just one more letter added to Update 1.
vCenter 6.5 Update 1d is interesting because it includes an updated HTML5 client for administrating vSphere virtual infrastructure. Its previous version has been included in vSphere Update 1 and since that time, there has been more than a dozen of vSphere Client updates released on VMware Labs website.
Keep in mind that this client still doesn’t support the functionality of vSphere in full. You can learn about its current functionality difference from vSphere Web Client in this article. These differences are described for 3.31 client version included in vCenter 6.5 Update 1d and at the moment of writing this article, the 3.32 version was released.
Nowadays, many VMware vSphere administrators manage their virtual infrastructures with VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (vCSA). This solution currently is a full-fledged alternative to the VMware vCenter for Windows which becomes a thing of the past.
For ones who use vCSA not that long, this post provides several procedures which simplify solutions’ daily use. Let’s have a look at how they may come in handy.
VMware has recently released VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO), a handy document that highlights the VAIO I/O Filtering technology operational principles. Here, we shed light on them briefly and discuss how VAIO can be implemented in a production environment.
VAIO is a technology and an API providing the direct access to the virtual machines’ guest OS I/O Stream. VAIO is already employed in partner products for maintaining various tasks (i.e., caching write-back and write-through). VAIO is based on the Storage Policy Based Management framework, dedicated to managing virtual machines storages and set the storage rules.
This spring, during VeeamON 2017, Veeam Software presented Veeam Powered Network (VeeamPN), their first solution in the field of enterprise networking.
Veeam PN is a simple tool for establishing VPN between all parts of a distributed infrastructure: the headquarters, remote and branch offices, employees working remotely, etc. This solution is based on the OpenVPN technology. It serves as a virtual machine, running in Microsoft Azure (Veeam PN Server) or client’s private cloud, with the components on customer’s sites (Veeam PN Gateway):
Very often, VMware vSphere administrators have to find the reasons of performance issues by analyzing the historical data of various metrics on the VMware vCenter Server. However, sometimes the default set of metrics is not enough if you view performance data for the previous night or the end of the past week – in this case, you need to change the level of collected metrics and, possibly, the frequency of their collection and retention.
In the VMware vCenter Server settings, you can set the data collection levels, different collection intervals and the time period that the data will be stored on the Server. In addition, you can set an approximate size of the virtual infrastructure in the host servers and virtual machines, which will allow to roughly estimate the size of the vCenter database. Let’s take a closer look at these settings.
VMware has recently released an update to its main platform for enterprise virtual and physical desktops infrastructure management – VMware Horizon 7.1. More than six months has passed since the release of the previous Horizon 7.0.2 version, and a whole year since the release of the major Horizon 7.
During this time, VMware managed to carry out a lot of interesting and useful developments, such as Just-in-Time Management Platform (JMP) and Instant Clones technology improvements, so let’s take a look at the list of the main new Horizon 7.1 capabilities, which can come in handy in your enterprise VDI infrastructure:
As administrators of VMs infrastructure based on VMware Horizon 7 well know, the last version of VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 (UEM) solution provides an interesting feature – Smart Policies. This functionality allows customization of user environment on a virtual desktop, depending on various conditions, such as the location from which the user logs in.
As many admins of virtual infrastructures know, for the first time ever, VMware vSphere 6.5 received the long awaited encryption feature of both virtual disks content and vMotion hot migrations.
The VMs encryption works based on AES-NI algorithm, and the key management is carried out based on KMIP 1.1 standard. When I/O operation comes to the disk of the virtual machine, it is immediately encrypted on-the-fly, which provides complete security against data security attack.
