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vSphere 6.5 Component Password Recovery (vCenter, SSO and ESXi)

Everyone knows the situation where you can't log into a system because you have forgotten the password. The following article explains how to reset the password and regain access to VMware vSphere 6.5 core components including vCenter, SSO and ESXi Hosts.

  • Reset vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 root password
  • Reset SSO Administrator Password (vCenter Server Appliance 6.5)
  • Reset ESXi root password with Host Profiles
  • Gain Administrative ESXi access with an Active Directory
  • Reset ESXi root password (Linux Live CD)

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vMA 6: Recover vi-admin Password and Remove Password Complexity

When you've installed the vSphere Management Assistant 6.0 (vMA) you very like came across its very strict password policy. With this requirements, the password recovery for vMAs is a common tasks. This post explains how to recover forgotten vMA passwords and how to use insecure, simple passwords for lab uses.vma-bad-password

Please provide a password for the vi-admin user.
BAD PASSWORD: to short
BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word
BAD PASSWORD: is too simple
...Have exhausted maximum number of retries for service

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How to Increase VCSA External PSC Disk Space in vSphere 6

The vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 uses the Linux Logical Volume Management (LVM) that allows you to dynamically increase the disk size of the vCenter Server disks. For the vCenter server itself the process to increase the capacity is well documented in KB2126276. When you have an external Platform Services Controller, the tool mentioned in the KB is missing. You can't use "vpxd_servicecfg storage lvm autogrow" to increase the space automatically so you have to do it manually.

This post explains how to increase the disk space for an external platform service controller.

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How to properly initialize PowerCLI 6.x in PowerShell ISE

With the release of vSphere 6.0 VMware has started to transform their distribution model of PowerCLI cmdlets from PSSnapins into modules. This is a good thing because modules are the preferred method of adding cmdlets to PowerShell. Unfortunately the changed behavior breaks plenty instructions on how to load VMware PowerCLI in ISE, including my own. The old method works for core cmdlets, but functions related to Distributed Switches or Storage Policies for example are missing.

If you have the latest version of PowerCLI installed but cmdlets are missing in PowerShell ISE, maybe you are using the old method to load cmdlets.

Get-VDSwitch : The term 'Get-VDSwitch' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.

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Integrate VMware NSX-V in Log Insight

VMware Log Insight provides an easy, at a glance, view of an entire VMware environment including NSX and other components. Additionally available content packs provide predefined knowledge about events. Problems with a vSphere environment can be identified by simply looking at the Overview dashboard.
nsx-log-insight-integrationThis post describes how to integrate all NSX Components into VMware Log Insight.

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Manage NSX 6 with Active Directory Users

When you login as a user from an external authentication source like Active Directory or LDAP, configuration of NSX is not possible. The Network & Security button is present, but no NSX Managers or other configuration objects are visible, despite the user has administrative permissions at the vCenter Object. Network & Security configuration is empty. The default vCenter Administrator can see everything.nsx-missing-permissions
VMware NSX has its own permissions structure, separated from vCenter Server Permissions.

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VMware NSX-V 6.2 Beginners Guide - From Zero to Full Deployment for Labs

NSXVMware NSX-V is the SDDC technology of the future. What ESX was once for Servers, NSX is now for Networks. I highly encourage everyone to make yourselves familiar with this technology. NSX with all its features is quite complex, but the entry point is quite simple and requires only basic vSphere and networking skills. This beginners guide explains how to deploy NSX in your homelab even with limited physical ressources by downsizing NSX Manager and NSX Controller VMs. The guide starts at zero and quickly explains how to deploy NSX and connect your first Virtual Machine to a VXLAN based logical switch that is able to communicate to the physical world through an NSX Edge Gateway.

What do you need to create the Lab?

  • vCenter 6 with some physical ESXi Hosts
  • vSphere Distributed Switch (dvSwitch)
  • NSX Manager Appliance (Download: NSX 6.2.2)
  • There is no special physical Switch requirement

Read More »VMware NSX-V 6.2 Beginners Guide - From Zero to Full Deployment for Labs

Evaluate PernixData FVP with replayed Production IO Traces

Using synthetic workloads to test drive PernixData FVP might result into odd findings. The most meaningful approach to test FVP is to deploy the software to production in monitor mode, let Architect do its magic and enable acceleration after checking the recommendations after a couple of days. Despite it is possible to deploy FVP, test drive, and remove it, without any downtime to virtual machines, this approach might not fit to all environments.

pernixdata-fvp-replay-workload

If you have separate DEV/QA environments with sophisticated load generators, the solution is obviously. If you don't have that, there is another option by record production I/O traces and replay them in a FVP accelerated test platform.

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Howto NOT Benchmark PernixData FVP

Whenever I evaluate a new storage hardware or technology, I do some basic performance testing with VMware I/O Analyzer. I/O Analyzer is virtual appliance (Fling) provided by VMware that runs Iometer to generate synthetic I/O workloads. After installing PernixData FVP my first idea was to compare the raw performance of my storage, against the performance with PernixData FVP. However, I quickly noticed that synthetic workloads do not create any useful results. The upside is that I've learned much about how their caching operates so I'm publishing my results anyway. Actually, it's not a problem with PernixData FVP itself, it's just how host based caching works.pernixdata-fvp-vmware-io-analyzer

Conclusion: Don't use synthetic workloads to test caching solutions! PernixData FVP works as expected but synthetic I/O workloads are no meaningful benchmarks for host based caching. I am going to test with realworld applications in another article to show how they can take advantage of FVP.

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How to create custom vCenter Alarms from Events

In my last article I've created a custom vCenter alert with a special event trigger. I've received a question about how to figure out the trigger event string to be used for creating alarms.

The vSphere Client shows the following error event:vcenter-event

To create an alarm based on this event, you have to create a new alarm and use the following event trigger: com.vmware.vc.vsan.RogueHostFoundEvent
alarm-trigger-RogueHostFoundEvent

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