2018 VeeamON took place in Chicago. Not everybody had the time or funding to go there. But there’s good news. Like in the years before there’ll be a virtual conference that makes it easy to attend. Join VeeamON Virtual 2018 from your desk, couch or garden hammock.
It’s been a pleasure being media partner for the event last year. And so I will join this year’s event too. Stay tuned!
Registration
Grab your virtual seat and save the date on December 5th 2018. Registration is free but priceless.
Relink VM MoRef IDs to Veeam Backup Restore-Points
In this post I will show how to use Veeam Migration Utility in cases when you have to migrate a whole cluster to a new vCenter, but you can’t afford to cut existing backup chains.
The Good
Upgrading a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has become a commodity in recent times. All you have to do is to run an upgrade wizard and point to the old VCSA. Thanks to VMware developers it’s one of these “Next-Next-Finish” deployments. At the end you’ll have an upgraded vCenter with same settings, name, IP, and (if you like) historic data. This is great! I can remember vCenter on Windows upgrades that were a PITA.
The Bad
In some rare (but ugly) occasions you simply can’t use the wizard and you have to migrate your hosts to a completely new VCSA without data migration. You’ll have to rebuild every setting, datacenter, cluster, folder, pool, group, rule, etc from scratch to match your old environment. Continue reading “vCenter Appliance Migration Upgrade”
It’s only a few weeks until VMworld Europe will open its doors at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona.
If you plan to go there for the first time it’s good to have some basic tips at hand. On my first visit to VMworld Barcelona I was glad to have read a very useful blogpost by Vladan. He keeps it updated and it is still worth a look. Continue reading “VMworld Europe Survival Guide”
After installing VMware patches you might see a warning:
XXX esx.problem.hyperthreading.unmitigated.formatonhost not found XXX
Those patches which are addressed in VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2018-0020 migitate a vulnerability named L1TF. Because the patch will result in a performance impact, it is not activated by default. Administrators need to decide what is their main focus: performance or security.
Suppress warning
If one decides to have more performance and neglects the potential threat, then it is possible to suppress the warning. Just set advanced option UserVars.SuppressHyperthreadWarning from 0 to 1 and the warning will disappear. This should only be done after reviewing KB 55806.
Activate migitation
Connect to the vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web or vSphere Client. Switch to “Hosts and Clusters” view and select an ESXi host in your inventory. Select an ESXi host in the inventory.
Click the Manage (5.5/6.0) or Configure (6.5/6.7) tab and then switch to “Settings”. Move to System > Advanced System Settings and enter in the filterbox: VMkernel.Boot.hyperthreadingMitigation.
Select the setting and click the Edit pencil icon. Change the default value (false) to true and click OK.
In order to take effect, the host needs to reboot.
PowerCLI
Using PowerCLI is recommended if you have more than one host.
Connect-VIServer vc.mydomain.com
Check current values.
Get-VMHost | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name VMkernel.Boot.hyperthreadingMitigation | Select Entity, Name, Value
Set values
The next command will activate the migitation on all hosts without confirmation (be careful!).
