New publications in IT-Administrator Magazine

Optimization, troubleshooting and monitoring of virtual infrastructures is like a scientific subject in itself and one of my IT-passions. Together with my buddy Dr. Jens Söldner I have published two articles in german IT-Administrator magazine (German Language), which cover the subjects above.

First article covers strategies for vSphere troubleshooting, best practises and useful tools like VeeamOne, RVTools, vRealize Log Insight or Runecast-Analyzer.

Second article covers vSphere management, administration, automatization and deployment.

IT-Administrator – Special Edition 01/2019

This special edition is available well-assorted magazine stores or can be obtained directly from the publisher’s website.

NSX 6.4 UI problem with older vCenter versions

I’m a great fan of vSphere-Client a.k.a HTML5 client. The user interface based on project clarity is an eye catcher and the user experience is great. But sometimes you’re forced to use the old Flash based flex-client. Not with latest vCenter Server 6.7 but with older releases like vSphere 6.0.

We were facing compatibility issues between flex-client 6.0 and NSX 6.4.4 although it’s a supported combination.

Continue reading “NSX 6.4 UI problem with older vCenter versions”

Enable SSH cluster-wide with PowerCLI

This article shows how to quickly enable SSH service on one, more or all hosts in a cluster.

Start service

Login to vCenter.

Connect-VIServer <myVC>

The command below will activate SSH on all hosts registered in in your vCenter.

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | Where Key -EQ "TSM-SSH" | Start-VMHostService

TSM means “Technical Support Mode”

Stop SSH service

To stop SSH service on all hosts, use the command below.

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | Where Key -EQ "TSM-SSH" |  Stop-VMHostService -Confirm:$False

Selective activation

It’s possible to limit the scope of the command to one host. Just add the FQDN after Get-Host.

Get-VMHost myESX.myDomain.local | Get-VMHostService | Where Key -EQ "TSM-SSH" | Start-VMHostService

Setup of ESXi on Cisco UCS Flexflash SD media fails

Recently I was trying to roll out an ESXi on Cisco UCS C240 which was equipped with a local twin-SD FlexFlash card. Destination disk was discovered by ESXi setup but during installation we encountered an error:

“partedUtil failed with message: Error: Can’t have a partition outside the disk! Unable to read partition table for device /vmfs/devices/disks”

Continue reading “Setup of ESXi on Cisco UCS Flexflash SD media fails”