Author: Michael Schroeder

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Upgrade ESXi 6.5 with Fujitsu Custom Image

VIB Conflict

Host upgrades with custom images offer extended driver support for vendor specific hardware or agents. You’ll get drivers that are not included in a standard VMware (Vanilla) image. Upgrading with customized images may lead into trouble while updating existing driver packages. There used to be a nasty bug with the lsiprovider package on Fujitsu ESXi 5.1 images. Another example was the “death by upgrade” bug (blog post in German) when upgrading a customized Fujitsu installation to ESXi 6.0. There are other examples from different vendors in the hall of shame.

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Find VMs without tags

Check Backup-Tag SLA

VMware tags are a versatile tool to dynamically assign VMs to groups. One use-case is leveraging VM-Tags to guarantee backup-SLA. Im my case there’s a category named “Backup” which contains several backup SLA tags for weekly or daily backups.

Oneliner

With PowerCLI you can find out quickly which VMs have no tags.

connect-viserver myVC
get-vm | ?{ (get-tagassignment $_) -eq $null}

This query isn’t sufficient yet. It’ll report only VMs that have no tags at all. But we’d like to find VMs that have no tags from the category “Backup”. So we have to modify our query a little bit.

get-vm | ?{ (get-tagassignment $_ -category Backup) -eq $null}

You need to adjust your query with the corresponding category name.

 

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ESX physical uplink resiliency

Ensure vmnic uplink redundancy with Link State Tracking / Smart Links

A vSphere cluster is redundant in many aspects. The loss of one component may not lead to a loss of functionality. Therefore we are building RAID sets from multiple disk drives, have redundant controllers in our storages, have multiple paths, redundant LAN- and SAN-switches and multiple uplinks from a host to the physical network.

VMware vSphere uses multiple physical NICs to form a logical NIC in order to gain redundancy. This is crucial for kernelports, which are responsible for vMotion, Management Network, FT, iSCSI and Heartbeats.

But there are scenarios where all vmnics have physical uplink, but a path loss further downstream towards the core lets packets wander into a black hole.

We will now discuss some network architectures and how to work around the issue.

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