Virtualization Team

Category: Server Virtualization

  • Deploying VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance

    Lately for most of my labs and even for many customers I have been deploying the VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance, as it is much quicker to install and give less chances for error. Further it saves customers a Windows license and not to mention being much easier to maintain, patch and upgrade. Further, with many…

  • Assign Domain Users vCenter Single Sign Administrator Privileges

    If you have upgraded your Virtual Infrastructure to vSphere 5.1 or 5.5, you are already aware of the addition of Single Sign On. When installing Single Sign On, a default user Admin@System-Domain is created for you with a password that you have assigned to it during the vCenter Single Sign On installation. The Admin@System-Domain user…

  • ATS-Only VMFS Volume ‘VMFS5’ not mounted. Host does not support ATS or ATS initialization has failed.

    While being at a customer site last week, I was asked if I could help with a mysterious VMFS datastore behavior. That particular datastore out of a sudden became none accessible and they could not carry out any changes to it. They can not VMotion in or out of it, or even create a folder…

  • How to replace vCenter 5.1, SSO, Web Client, vCO Certificates

    With the release of vSphere 5.1 certificates started to play a much more vital role, where having invalid certificates in your environment is not an option anymore as it could break the operation of your environment as well forbid you from logging in. This change has been done to increase the security of your Virtual…

  • vCenter Single Sign On 5.1 best practices

    Since vCenter Single Sign On was introduced in vSphere 5.1, many questions have been rising around it. There seems to be a very limited amount of resources out there that document best practices related to vCenter Single Sign On, which is the reason for me to develop this post where I will try to combine…

  • Call “HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed.

    While working with my home vSphere 5.1 lab the other day, I was trying to create a VMFS5 datastores on my local SATA disk. Each time I tried to do that I was just welcomed with the following error: Call “HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed. Please note xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx stand for my host…

  • vSphere 5.1 VMware Tools NTP Settings

    In earlier versions of VMware vSphere, many of us used to configure VMware tools settings by double clicking VMware tools inside the guest OS. This was most often used to configure NTP in the Virtual Machine VMware tools. Just to remind you of what that looked like: Alright if you try to do the same…

  • Microsoft Exchange 2010 is definetly supported on VMware vSphere

    I know most of my readers are already aware that Microsoft Exchange & Microsoft SQL have been supported on VMware vSphere for quite long time. In fact, there is so many companies are using it at unbelievably large production scale. Though today while going back from my customer site by train, I was talking to…

  • Data Center Virtualization

    Companies once prided themselves on having a huge data center full of servers, storage devices and network hubs, all working together to run the business. You need a huge amount of infrastructure just to support your computing infrastructure. One mammoth search engine company owns a data center that is so complex that it even creates…

  • vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 5) – vSphere Web Client Step by Step

    Alright now that you got your vCenter 5.1 up and running & ready to start managing it. I know vSphere Client will be the first thing to come to your mind in here, but its worth mentioning that all the new features in vSphere 5.1 is only included in the vSphere Web Client not the…

  • vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 4) – vCenter Service Step by Step

    As covered in my previous three posts, vCenter Service is the third component to be installed. As a reminder the order of installing vCenter 5.1 components is as follow: Single Sign On ==> vCenter inventory Service ==> vCenter Service. In this post, I will demonstrate in a step by step fashion how to install the…

  • vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 3) – vCenter 5.1 Inventory Service Installation

    In my previous two posts, I have demonstrated how to prepare the databases required for the different vCenter 5.1 components(SSO, vCenter Service, & Update Manager)  as well how to install vCenter Single Sign On. If you have not went through these earlier two posts, then you will need to follow them before proceeding with this…

  • vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 2) – Single Sign On Installation

    During the installation of vCenter 5.1, you will need to install 3 components in the following order: Single Sign On => Inventory Service => vCenter Service. In a new installation I would normally install the Web Service after installing the vCenter Service, though during an upgrade I would install the web service right after the…

  • vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 1) – Preparing the Databases

    After the introduction of vSphere 5.1, there seemed to be a lot of fuzz about the installation of the new vCenter components. I believe most of the hype was caused about how the initial vSphere 5.1 release behaved differently against expired certificates from how vSphere version prior to 5.1 behaved. In earlier releases, vCenter has…

  • VMware vSphere Free Compliance Checkers

    While data security has always been one of the top CEOs concerns for the past decade or so, more compliance regulation has been hitting organizations doors every year. After organizations have mastered how to secure their physical environment by using physical segregation, Virtualization came around and changed the security game. Now organizations has to ensure…