VMware 2 - Mike Tabor

How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 VMware

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.

How to fix VMware Converter error “FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored”

April 24, 2018 VMware

2 Comments

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.

How-to fix VMware Converter error FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

April 10, 2018 VMware

3 Comments

I was recently tasked with migrating a Hyper-V machine to our VMware environment. However, each time VMware Converter was ran, the task would fail at 97% with an error “FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.“.

Looking further into the virtual machine there were a number of concerns I had on the VM. One such issue which I believe might be causing the above error, is that the system volume drive was on drive 0 while the “C:” drive was on drive 1. Whereas these are typically on the same drive in most Windows installs.

Below are the steps I took to fix this VM and made the migration from Hyper-V to VMware a success.

Fixing, This host currently has no management network redundancy

October 26, 2017February 18, 2018 VMware

1 Comment

I recently redid my VMware home lab environment and after enabling HA the warning message “This host currently has no management network redundancy” started displaying on each of my ESXi hosts.

This warning happens because in a HA cluster there is a requirement for the management network to have redundant NICs, but in my case I’m using Intel NUCs which only have a single NIC and since this is only a lab I don’t care to see the warning so lets disable it.

How to Add Login Banner to vSphere Web Client

September 4, 2017September 6, 2017 VMware

2 Comments

If you have the pleasure or meeting certain audits or security compliance then having a login banner message on your systems is a pretty common requirement. Sometime ago I detailed how to add a login banner message to ESXi hosts, below I’ll show how easy it is to do the same with your VMware vSphere web client or HTML5 client using vSphere 6.0 Update 2 or better.

How to update VMware ESXi 6.5 to 6.5 Update 1

August 16, 2017August 15, 2017 VMware

4 Comments

With the release of VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1 also comes VMware ESXi 6.5 Update 1 and just like vCenter there are a number of changes, updates, and fixes for ESXi as well in 6.5 Update 1 – you can see the release notes here.

Yesterday I made a post on how to upgrade VMware VCSA 6.5 to 6.5 Update 1. Below I’ll show you three ways to upgrade your ESXi hosts to 6.5 Update 1.

Update vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.5 Update 1

August 15, 2017August 16, 2017 VMware

0 Comments

VMware just released VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1 just last month, in case you’ve missed it check out the release notes as there are a lot of fixes, improvements and additions.

In this post we’ll see just how easy it is to update the VMware VCSA. Before you do any VMware update I’d highly recommend checking out the VMware Interoperability Matrices to check compatibility of other VMware products. Once you’ve done that, lets begin!

Backup and Restore VMware VCSA 6.5

August 9, 2017 VMware

0 Comments

With the release of vSphere 6.5, the VCSA has had a built-in and convenient way easily backup the configuration, inventory and even historical data right from the VAMI and directly into a TAR bundle. VMware has also made restoring the VCSA from a backup just as easy as well.

Below are quick and dirty steps to backing up and restoring your VMware VCSA!

VMware P2V Permission to perform this operation was denied fix

July 27, 2017 VMware

12 Comments

Just the other day we had a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard physical server that needed to be P2V’ed, and after trying to use VMware Converter Standalone 6.1.1 we ran into the error message “Permission to perform this operation was denied” after entering the source machine details.

Even after trying to start VMware Converter as “Run as administrator” the error persisted. Below is the workaround we performed to quickly allow us to P2V the physical server.

VMware Workstation 12.5.5 released, fixes Pwn2Own exploits

March 28, 2017March 28, 2017 VMware

0 Comments

VMware has just released Workstation 12.5.5 which includes bug fixes as well as fixes for several vulnerabilities found in this years Pwn2Own contest, which two hacking teams, 360 Security (@mj011sec) and Team Sniper was able to successfully complete a virtual machine escape.

While these are serious exploits, VMware has said they are not aware of any active exploitation of the vulnerabilities that has now been fixed in 12.5.5.