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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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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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VMware ESXi 6.0 CBT bug fix released
You may remember ESXi 4.x-5.x had a CBT bug, as mentioned here, that could potentially cause your backups to be pretty useless. Well it seems ESXi 6.0 isn’t without it’s own CBT bug which could cause the following to possibly occur:
- Backing up a VM with CBT enabled fails.
- Powering on virtual machines fails.
- Expanding the size of a virtual disk fails.
- Taking VM quiesced snapshots fails.
Prior to the fix, the workaround was to disable CBT. Thankfully VMware has released a fix for the ESXi 6.0 CBT bug and it’s recommended that anyone who uses CBT apply this patch regardless if it was a clean install of VMware ESXi 6.0 or an upgrade to ESXi 6.0.
How to fix VMware Converter error “FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored”
While moving some VM’s from Hyper-V to VMware using VMware Converter a VM failed to convert with the error: FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored.
FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored because there is not enough space on the source volumes or because the source machine does not have any NTFS volumes. Error code: 2147754783 (0x8004231F).
Come to find out the System Reserved partition was full. Our soon to be retired Appassure backup application was nice enough to fill up the volume.
Luckily Appassure is being replaced by Veeam and fixing the above VMware Converter error is an easy fix.
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My VMware View Windows 7 Optimization Guide
These are the few steps I do when creating a new "Golden" image. Luckily I don’t have to do these steps all the time as I’ll create the "Golden" image when there is a new upgrade such as when we went from View 4.6 to View 5.0.1. I like to have a new fresh machine using new virtual hardware from the start. You could certainly just upgrade the virtual hardware on the "Golden" image, I just prefer to start clean.
At any rate, here’s my list. Hopefully someone might find it somewhat useful and maybe even others can improve upon it.
Preparing a new virtual machine
- Create New Virtual Machine – FILE > NEW > VIRTUAL MACHINE (CTRL+N)
- Under Configuration select CUSTOM.
- Select a Name, Folder, Host, Cluster, and Storage.
- Under Guest Operating System select Windows and then Windows 7 32bit under the Version drop down.
- Select which Network (VLAN) and under Adapter select VMXNET 3.
- Configure disk size to 30GB THIN provisioned.
How to install VMware vCenter Log Insight
Log Insight is a real-time log management and analytics solution, and one of VMware’s newest product. Log Insight was recently updated to version 2.0 and available to download here.
Below we’ll go through the steps to installing VMware Log Insight and you’ll soon see just how easy it is to get Log Insight up and running.