Virtually Jason

One of my customers recently experienced a strange issue.  One of their ESXi hosts had entered a problem state where Storage vMotion and vMotion were failing for all VMs on the host (vMotion was failing at 13%, which is an interesting spot).  We initially noticed the issue when Storage vMotion repeatedly threw an error for one of their VMs: A general system error occurred: Failed to create journal file provider: Failed to open "/var/log/vmware/journal/..." for write: There is no space left on the device. Well, that error seemed self explanatory.  I connected to the host's CLI (SSH was already enabled, which made that easier) and did a "vdf -h" to look at its file system.  I was surprised to find that none of the partitions were full, so I dug deeper. I decided to take a look at the vmkwarning log file, which is frequently a gold mine when troubleshooting ESXi host issues.  So, I did a quick "tail /var/log/vmkwarning.log" and, lo and  behold, we h...

Towards the start of the year, I made a post about my vCenter to vCenter migration process , which can be used to update from vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6 (or for that matter, to downgrade, or whatever).  Since then, I've done a lot of these migrations and the scripts/procedure have matured.   Jeff and I have fixed many bugs, but the reason that I'm posting about this (again) is that I recently added a new feature and have polished our migration process. The latest versions of the migration scripts (the ones that get the settings from the source vCenter and then recreate those settings on the destination vCenter) now support DRS Rules!  The native support for DRS Rule manipulation through PowerCLI is a bit lacking... but fortunately, the community has solved that problem!   Matt Boren and Luc Dekens have created a module called DRSRule that is built to help with the reading and manipulation of DRS Rules (pretty self explanatory, right?).  I took advantage of t...