Virtually Jason

Have you ever been in a situation where you've needed to reload a VM's VMX file?  It's not very common, but it does happen occasionally.  VMware has a KB Article about how to do it, but it requires vim-cmd, which means that you need access to the host's CLI.  This isn't that big of a deal, unless you need to reload a lot of VMs that are scattered across many ESXi hosts.  Fortunately, Techazine has posted an article about a technique that reloads all invalid VMs via PowerCLI.  In my use case, I only needed to target a small set of VMs, so I just used that technique as follows: @("VM1","VM2","VM3") | % {(get-vm $_ | get-view).reload()}

One of my customers recently had a major issue; due to a fault in their cooling system, their server room overheated and many devices turned themselves off in order to avoid damage... including one of their SANs.  After resolving the cooling issue, the environment largely came back up without serious incident, however there was one lingering problem. Several VMs in the environment could not connect to their distributed virtual switch.  Each VM was associated with its port group correctly, however the "connected" checkbox was cleared.  When we tried enabling that option, the task failed with an error that read: Invalid Configuration for Device '0' Some quick googling revealed a VMware KB Article about this particular issue, with several different workarounds suggested.  They ranged from easy (move the VM to a different Port Group and back) to arduous and time consuming (remove the NIC from the VM, then add a new NIC and reassign its network identity to the new NI...

One of my customers uses the Sophos UTM virtual appliance as a firewall/router.  It was originally set up as an Astaro version 8 virtual appliance and has been upgraded in place since then.  When that appliance was first made available, it used the Flexible network adapter by default, although the recommendation now is to use vmxnet3 for better performance.  Unfortunately, during the upgrade process, this change never went into place. We’re trying to help this customer to resolve some performance problems and have identified that network adapter type as a potential bottleneck in their environment.  Before changing such a vital piece of a live environment, I decided to prototype it in the lab.  It turns out that Sophos no longer provides the virtual appliance , instead providing an ISO to install the software onto a VMware virtual machine.  No problem, I thought, and so I created the VM in my lab, aiming to match the appliance’s configuration settings. ...