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VMware Horizon View 5.3 is now available for download
VMware Horizon View 5.3 is now generally available (GA) for download. View 5.3 brings a number of cool features and if you haven’t heard about them yet be sure to check out my VMware Horizon View 5.3 announcement post. Lots of improvements for such a tiny version number change!
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How to Reset VMware vCenter Server Appliance Root Password
Have you ever forgotten the root password on your VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) or let the password expire before changing it?
This is exactly what happened to me in one of my lab environments and in this post I’ll show how to quickly and easily reset the VCSA root password.
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Restore a VM using the {vm}-flat.vmdk file
A couple days ago I was asked the question “An admin deleted the vmdk file associated with a VM, there are no snapshots or backups of the VM . Can we restore this VM somehow?“. I believe in backups, I like to have my VM’s backed up so that I can depend on them for events just like this very issue. At first I was stumped, until the {vm-name}.flat.vmdk was mentioned. That’s when I remembered a method to recover a VM using the vm-flat.vmdk file that I had actually done 2-3 years ago.
Upgrade ESXi host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5
A while back I wrote about how to upgrade to ESXi 5.5 via command line which works great when you only have a few hosts as each host has to download the ISO from the web each time. This time I’ll show you step by step how to upgrade your ESXi 5.1 host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5 (aka VUM).
For this post I’m going to assume you have already upgraded your vCenter and VUM to versions 5.5 as well as the VUM plugin installed. So lets begin!
Upgrade ESXi host to 5.5 using VMware Update Manager (VUM)
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My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade
Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.
For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.
At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.
I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.
So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!
Increase incremental backup speed by enabling CBT
In a recent VMware environment I was working in, we noticed that our incremental backups was taking a long time (like up to 7-8 hours) to complete. After digging around it was found that VMware actually has a feature built-in since version 4 called Change Block Tracking (CBT). CBT will track any blocks that were changed since the last backup and tag them and stores the information in a -CTK file. The obvious benefit is that now the third party software only backs up the changed block and not the entire VM each time, reducing the amount of data being backed thus speeding up backups and even lowers the CPU utilization on the VM host.
CBT is disabled by default though there are some backup tools that will enable it automatically or you can enable it manually which can easily be done following these steps:
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