Mike Tabor

How to fix “SRA command discoverArrays failed” in SRM with RecoverPoint
April 25, 2016August 10, 2017 VMware
2 Comments

We’ve ran into an issue trying to get VMware SRM and SRA 2.2.0.3 along with EMC Recoverpoint 4.1.2 to communicate with one another and would receive this error in SRM:

SRA command discoverArrays failed. Failed opening session for user to site mgmt IP.

Please see server logs for further details.

After some digging around a bit and talking with the Storage Team and EMC we found out that this is due to the SRA’s using HTTP by default and Recoverpoint 4.1.2 does not accept HTTP, but instead only accepts HTTPS or port 443. The steps below is how to get everything to default HTTPS and then communication will resume.

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Synology DSM 6.0 goes live, lots of new features
March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 Synology
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Synology has officially released DSM 6.0 (build 7321), offering a number of new features, functionality, and security improvements. Some of the most talked about features being the addition of Btrfs File System, SpreadSheet package (think Google Sheets) and the ability to run multiple virtual DSM environments within a single Synology NAS.

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Download VMware vCenter & ESXi 6.0 Update 2
March 17, 2016March 17, 2016 VMware
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VMware has released vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2 and ESXi 6.0 Update 2 (build: 3620759) which include a number of new features and fixes. VMware has also released the much anticipate VSAN 6.2 which includes it’s own bunch of new features such as deduplication, compression, QoS, and RAID5/RAID6 Erasure coding.
- vCenter 6.0 U2 Download
- ESXi 6.0 U2 Download
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VMware releases patch for glibc vulnerability on ESXi 5.5
February 23, 2016February 25, 2016 VMware
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You may remember not to long ago, the GHOST vulnerability found in glibc, a GNU C library. Well a new glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547) has been discovered and it affects VMware ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 in addition to all versions of VMware virtual appliances running Linux such as vCenter, Orchestrator, vRealize, etc.

VMware has just released patch ESXi550-201602401-SG for ESXi 5.5 and ESXi600-201602401-SG for ESXi 6.0 which fixes the glibc vulnerability, ~~a patch for ESXi 6.0 has yet to be released~~. VMware has however posted workarounds for affected virtual appliances.

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HTML5 Embedded Host Client, this looks promising
February 18, 2016February 17, 2016 VMware
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It’s no secret many people have really disliked the vSphere web client, it’s very sluggish, clunky, and based on flash (flash comes with it’s own security issues). It was rumored and highly hoped that vSphere 6 might be re-written in HTML5, but sadly this didn’t and hasn’t happened yet. While vSphere 6 did improve a bit on the web client the issues many people have had with it in the past still remain today.

Enter the VMware HTML5 Embedded Host Client fling. I’ve been using and following this fling for a while now and have really enjoyed it and with each release it keeps getting better and better.

The Embedded Host Client fling is based on HTML5 which allows it works great across all kinds of platforms, it’s fast, responsive, and doesn’t require any plug-ins – YES the VM console works great. If this happens to be a look of what’s to come in a new VMware vSphere web client, then a client is looking very promising!

If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. It’s extremely easy to install and doesn’t even require a reboot just follow these simple instructions.

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How to upgrade Synology DS1815+ to 16GB RAM
February 16, 2016March 3, 2016 Synology
50 Comments

Just last week I replaced my Synology DS412+ to with a Synology DS1815+, which has twice the drive bays with the addition of supporting two expansion units, a much more powerful CPU, and 2GB RAM out of the box.

I’ve seen some people mention with very mixed results that both the Synology DS1515+ and Synology DS1815+ can be upgraded to 16GB of RAM, the biggest issue seems to be around what memory modules to use. So I figured I’d document how I upgraded my DS1815+ to 16GB RAM and what memory I used with success.

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Power off an unresponsive VM using ESXTOP
February 2, 2016February 3, 2016 VMware
1 Comment

Just recently we have some hardware issues in our primary datacenter and during that time had a few VM’s that became unresponsive and needed to get them back online. The VM’s had stopped responding to the normal vSphere commands to reboot, shutdown or even restart. I didn’t want to power cycle the entire ESXi host and instead just power off an unresponsive VM.

Here is a quick and easy way to do just that using ESXTOP.

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vCenter server service won’t start after upgrading 5.5 to Update 3b
January 5, 2016 VMware
1 Comment

Just a quick heads up! Over the last week I’ve been upgrading our vCenter servers from version 5.5 to the most recent 5.5 Update 3b version and have ran into a small hiccup.

The upgrade of SSO, Web Client, Inventory Service and even vCenter server all went as expected without any issues. Then I rebooted the vCenter server and after the reboot noticed that the vCenter server service hadn’t started and when I tried to start it manually I then received the following error:

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

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Synology DS415+ NAS Review
November 17, 2015November 19, 2015 Synology
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For the past week I was given the chance to ~~abuse~~ use and review the Synology DS415+ NAS, a NAS which is aimed at small businesses or home users that need extra horsepower (such as a VMware home lab).

The Synology DS415+ is the replacement for the Synology DS412+, in fact by looking at the two units you really can’t tell them apart aside from the model number printed on the lower left corner of the hard drive cover plate. The real differences between the Synology DS412+ and Synology DS415+ isn’t on the outside but what’s inside.

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Another CBT bug found in VMware ESXi 6.0
November 12, 2015November 29, 2015 VMware
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VMware just published KB 2136854 regarding a new bug found in ESXi 6.0 that causes virtual machine backups, which use Changed Block Tracking (CBT), to be inconsistent. VMware says the cause of the issue is this:

This issue occurs due to an issue with CBT in the disklib area, this causes the change tracking information of I/Os that occur during snapshot consolidation to be lost. The main backup payload data is never lost and it is always written to the backend device. However, the corresponding change tracking information entries which occur during the consolidation task are missed. Subsequent QueryDiskChangedAreas() calls do not include these missed blocks, hence a backup based on this CBT data is inconsistent.

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