Microsoft’s Convenience Update breaks VMware VMXNet3 vNICs

Microsoft recently pushed out a “Convenience Update“, a sort of rollup of rollups for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 machines. This “Convenience Update” however comes with an incompatibility issue with VMware virtual machines that are using VMXNet3 network adapters, which causes the network to become unresponsive.

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VMware releases patch for glibc vulnerability on ESXi 5.5

VMware ESXi550-201602401-SG

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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How to upgrade Synology DS1815+ to 16GB RAM

Synology DS1815+ upgraded to 16GB

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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vCenter server service won’t start after upgrading 5.5 to Update 3b

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 DSM 5.2 exits beta, goes Gold

Synology

Synology has just released DSM 5.2-5565 that’s been in beta for a while now but has finally left beta and ready for prime time!

DSM 5.2-5565 is packed with a load of new features such as Single Sign-On, iSCSI LUN Snapshots along with MANY new packages and package updates. Like Cloud Station now being able to sync files larger then 10GB! DSM 5.2 also introduces support for Docker!

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Easy ESXi 6.0 upgrade via command line

VMware has released ESXi 6.0 back in March and I recently posted a guide on how to upgrade your vCenter Server Appliance from 5.x to 6.0 – Now we’re going to look at two ways to upgrade a VMware ESXi 5.x host to ESXi 6.0 via command line.

The first method will show you how to have each ESXi host download the update directly from VMware and then upgrade itself while the second method shows how to download the update, place it on a datastore accessible to the host, then upgrade the host.

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