Posts

Posted on

vSAN Health – vSAN Disk Balance

If you have joined VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), you’re able to use Skyline-Health in your cluster. In older versions of vSphere/vSAN this feature used to be called vSphere-Health and vSAN-Health respectively. They both have been renamed to Skyline Health. You can access Skyline-Health in the vSphere-Client by navigating to Monitor > vSAN > Skyline-Health.

Today I’ve seen a warning after powering on up my homelab.

Drilling into details showed one of 4 hosts issued a warning: “Proactive rebalance is needed”.

Usually a vSAN cluster will distribute load amongst capacity disks automatically. For some reason that wasn’t the case in my homelab. But there’s help. You can click on “Configure Automatic Rebalance” directly from Skyline-Health (see picture below).

You’ll be redirected to vSAN cluster configuration. As you can see in the screenshot below, my cluster wasn’t configured for automatic rebalance.

Just move the slider and vSAN will automatically start to balance disks. A couple of minutes later the warning had switched to green. Depending on the cluster load and how imbalanced the capacity disks are, this process might take a while.

Links

VMware KB 2149809 – vSAN proactive rebalance

Posted on

Runecast free Analytics for Healthcare & VMware Horizon

Runecast will respond to COVID-19 crisis by offering free licenses to healthcare institutions and companies with VMware Horizon.

Helping companies to protect employees by letting them work from home and thus slowing down the rate of new infections is an important step in the battle against SARS-CoV-2.

Running an Horizon infrastructure in these days is a challenge for any IT team when the workloads shift from on premises to remote access. It is also vitally important to keep healthcare infrastructures up and running. Medical staff does a very good but demanding job these days aroud the globe. But they cannot do their job without IT infrastucture. Lives depend on that. So it’s a good initiative by Runecast to help making these infrastructures a bit safer.

I know a lot of people at Runecast and I’d like to express my personal thanks to everyone of them.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Free full VMware Horizon insights for EVERYONE

Work from your home office without any limitation.

  • Who does this apply to? Any organization running VMware Horizon that needs better tools or solutions for visibility into VMware Horizon environments (for remote office enablement).
  • How does it work? You’ll have full & immediate visibility of your VMware Horizon issues during the 14-day trial period. After the standard Runecast Analyzer free 14-day trial, Horizon issues analytics will continue to work for you until 15 September 2020.

Enable VMware Horizon scans now

Free full license of Runecast Analyzer for Healthcare institutions

  • Who does this apply to? IT Sys-Admins running VMware and/or AWS who need better tools or solutions for HIPAA security compliance and downtime mitigation.
  • How does it work? Create an account and send an email to healthcare@runecast.com for license activation.

Runecast Analyzer for Healthcare

Posted on

VMware vExpert 2020

Congratulations on your vExpert Award!

I received particularly good news during my vacation. VMware has awarded me the title vExpert for another year.

This award is an honor and motivation to continue my work for the vCommunity. For example by sharing knowledge in blog articles here at ElasticSky.de, or by giving talks at VMUG Meetings or the German VMUG UserCon.

vExpert Badge 2020

VMware vExpert Program

VMware annually awards the title vExpert to members of the community who have distinguished themselves in the past year through their special commitment. The award is aimed at people who have shared their knowledge and passion for VMware technology far beyond the demands of their daily work.

Links

vExpert Tweets on Twitter: #vExpert

VMTN Blog – vExpert 2020 Award Announcement

VMware – vExpert Directory

Posted on

PowerCLI offline installation

Strict security policies are in place in many corporate environments. This means that it is only possible to access internet resources to a limited extent, if at all. This becomes apparent, for example, when trying to install PowerCLI on a management system. While the availability of PowerCLI modules in the PowerShell Gallery provides an easy way to install or update PowerCLI, this is only possible if access to this external resource is allowed by Powershell. Using the Powershell Gallery requires the NuGet Packet Management Provider. This must also be obtained online.

 Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser

If the Internet connection is restricted or blocked, the above command fails. But you can also transfer the modules offline. For this you need a PC with free internet access. Here you use a different command, which does not install the modules, but only downloads them to a defined path.

 Save-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Path C:\temp\PSModules

Copy the entire contents of the PSModules folder to a storage medium of your choice (e.g. USB flash drive) and transfer the files to the desired offline system where PowerCLI is needed.

If you have admin rights on the target system, you can copy files to the loaction below.

 C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules

Now the PowerCLI modules are also available on the offline system. For a version update the procedure must be repeated. It is advisable to remove the VMware modules before transferring the current ones.

Get-Module VMware.* -ListAvailable | Uninstall-Module -Force

Further customization

Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)

The VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program collects data about the use of VMware products. You can either agree (true) or disagree (false). For offline systems, only the rejection (false) makes sense. The command shown below suppresses future notifications within PowerCLI.

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope AllUsers -ParticipateInCeip $false -confirm:$false

Ignore invalid SSL certificates

Bei Verwendung selbstsignierter Zertifikate im vCenter verweigert PowerCLI die Verbindung. Dieses Verhalten kann unterdrückt werden mit dem Befehl:

When using self-signed certificates in vCenter, PowerCLI will deny the connection. This behavior can be suppressed with the command:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope AllUsers -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -confirm:$false