While new versions of vSphere are being released and deployment methods have been changed, it’s currently not so straight forward to deploy a vSphere lab inside Fusion and Workstation. This due to the fact that there is no OVF-based vCenter Server Appliance install available anymore (as of vSphere 6) and there is some manual fiddling required to make this work. This article will describe the steps you need to take for deployment.
vCenter Server
Removing a VMware host from a VSAN cluster without putting it into maintenance mode
This post explains the steps you could take to remove a VSAN-enabled host from a VSAN cluster without putting it into maintenance mode. You could also use this method to remove an VSAN-less ESXi host from a cluster without putting it into maintenance mode.
Things to keep in mind when replacing #VMware #vSphere certificates
Some time ago, I replaced the SSL certificates in our test environment with the SSL Certificate Automation Tool. Everything went well, but some of the applications we were using or evaluating stopped working. This post will hopefully help you prevent applications to stop working after you replace the certificates in your environments.
vCenter Server 4.1 database limit reached
As I am writing this post, I just finished running some manual tasks because of a vCenter Server 4.1 database which was filled up at a customer.
Since the default SQL instance delivered by the vCenter Server installation is an Express Edition, no SQL agent is supplied. This means that the jobs created for automatic cleaning of the events and tasks is not happening properly.
The database I am talking about had 0 MB free and the vCenter Server service entered the stopped state because of this.
Everything I needed can be found in the following KB article supplied by VMware:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025914
To summarize:
Make sure all services of vCenter Server are stopped
Edit the dbo.VPX_PARAMETER table and set the events.MaxAge and tasks.MaxAge records to change how long events and tasks are supposed to be kept in days. We have these records set to 180.
Next, edit the records events.MxAgeEnabled and tasks.MaxAgeEnabled and set them to true.
Finally, run the Stored Procedure “dbo.cleanup_events_tasks_proc” and monitor the free space of the database using the properties window of the database.
It took about 20 minutes for us to clear out events from January 2010 until December 2012. Next step was starting all vCenter Server services and getting back to bed =)
SnowVM 