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Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 to 6.5

November 18, 2016June 5, 2017 VMware

VMware vSphere 6.5 has been released as general available and earlier this week I posted about Installing VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 as a new install, this post will walk through upgrading an existing vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 to 6.5!

Similar to a fresh VCSA 6.5 install, the VCSA 6.5 upgrade is also broken up into two stages. The first stage is deploying a new vCenter Server Appliance and the second stage is copying data from the 6.0 VCSA to the newly deployed 6.5 VCSA.

Update vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

October 26, 2018October 30, 2018 VMware

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VMware has released vCenter Server 6.7 Update 1 and with comes with a number changes.

One most notable change is the feature complete HTML5 vSphere client. The vSphere client in vCenter 6.7 Update 1 now includes the ability to manage:

Host profiles
Auto deploy
Full vSphere Update Manager (VUM)
A new dark theme
and vCenter High Availability.

That’s no where near all of the changes though, there are many more changes and updates in the 6.7 Update 1 update. Be sure to read the full release notes here.

In this post we’ll see just how easy it is to upgrade from VCSA 6.7 to VCSA 6.7 Update 1 in just a couple steps!

Clone VMware ESXi USB boot drive to another USB flash drive

April 21, 2014 VMware

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A few days ago one of my hosts in my home lab was displaying an alarm message:

Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhbaXX:XX:XX:XX backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhbaXX:XX:XX:XX. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage.

The last part of the message (“persistent storage”) made me think it might have something to do with the USB drive due to the fact that a similar message appeared when setting up the home lab on the Intel NUC’s. After some research it appears my assumption was correct and that the USB flash drive I was using to boot from was indeed starting to fail.

How to upgrade ESXi 6.5 to ESXi 6.7

August 24, 2018January 1, 2019 VMware

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VMware released ESXi 6.7 a little while ago, but it’s only been here recently have I started deploying it in my home and work lab environments. Below are two ways to easily upgrade your ESXi 6.5 hosts to ESXi 6.7 using the command line or by using the VMware ESXi offline bundle.

Note: As of the time of writing (8/24/2018) there are no supported upgrade paths from ESXi 6.5 U2 to ESXi 6.7.

How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 VMware

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The other day, one of our volumes in the lab environment filled up. This volume has a couple large VM’s on it, coupled with a couple different Veeam backup jobs running using the native Veeam backup methods as well as using NetApp snap mirror to snapshot the volume and then using Veeam to ship it out to Azure.

At any rate the volume filled up to the point where vCenter wasn’t allowing me to migrate VM’s off the datastore. I really didn’t want to expand the volume just so I could move VM’s off of it.

Instead, I decided to delete some of the older proof of concept snapshots from SnapMirror. Below are the quick and easy steps to clear up some un-used snapshots and free up some space on the datastore.

Set default printer for View floating desktop and Persona Management

December 11, 2013 VMware

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Sometime ago I asked a question over at the VMware forum about how to set default network printers on a VMware View 5.0 floating pool that used Persona Management as Persona Management wasn’t keeping this user setting on it’s own. The printers would be added to the VM just not remember the default printer setting. I’ll admit I forgot to update the thread, but a work around was devised which I’ll share below.