Month: February 2019

Objective 4.4 – Set up ESXi hosts

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

In this blog we will be looking at how to install ESXi, what are different methods to install ESXi and initial configuration after installation. This blog is divided in two sections, first section we will see how to install ESXi and in second section, we will look at configuration. I will only give brief about Auto Deploy as deploying ESXi using Auto Deploy is itself a whole different topic. If you would like to know more about Auto Deploy, let me know in comments and I will cover it as a separate blog. So without wasting any more time, let’s dig right into it.

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Objective 1.2 – Identify vCenter high availability (HA) requirements

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

Continuing to my last blog post series, this blog will cover exam objective 1.2 i.e. identify requirement for vCenter server high availability requirements. VCHA is not covered in any other objective so I will be covering brief overview, deployment scenario and how to configure it in this part of blog. So let’s get started.

Continue reading “Objective 1.2 – Identify vCenter high availability (HA) requirements” →

Objective 1.1 – Identify the pre-requisites and components for vSphere implementation

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

Good Morning All,

In last couple of days, I got some requests related to do some write ups on managing and configuring vSphere environment. As I was preparing for newly released VCP – DCV 2019 certification exam 2v0 – 21.19, I thought why not cover all exam objective as part of this blog series. Exam 2v0 – 21.19 covers vSphere 6.7 so we will discuss install, configure and management of vSphere 6.7 Update 1. It is very difficult to cover all exam objectives in a single blog, so I will try to cover one objective per blog. This is first part of my very long blog series covering first exam objective. So let’s get going.

Continue reading “Objective 1.1 – Identify the pre-requisites and components for vSphere implementation” →

AD Computer Account creation during Machine Provisioning in vRealize Automation using vRO

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

I was working with vRealize Automation blueprints when i ran into a very interesting requirement. From vRA 7.1 onward, VMware introduced AD Policies which can automate creation of AD computer account during machine provisioning which is a very helpful feature. After upgrading environment from vRA 6.2 to vRA 7.3, I got requirement to automate AD computer account creation process. But this is where i ran into challenges:

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Configure Active/Active North-South Cross vCenter NSX

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

Hello Everyone.

Two cups of Espresso in me and a late night blog. Writing while working just to keep me awake.

So without much further wait, i had a scenario similar to below design:

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Enable Automatic Manager Service Failover

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in VMware News

So yesterday, i had finished with distributed installation of vRA 7.3. I configured tenants, fabric, business groups and created a base blueprint for testing purpose. All was breeze and was working fine. So today i decided to go with failure testing scenarios.

I brought down my Active IaaS Manager service node and hop into vRA console to see if everything is working fine. But alas, i started seeing logs that my Agent cannot connect to manager service. It is down and agent cannot connect to proxy.

Error Log:

Could not connect to the Manager Service. The service might be offline or restarting. If this error persists, verify the that ManagerService.exe is running and that the endpoint, https://<iaasname>/VMPS2Proxy, can be reached.
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Decoding PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) of ESXi to find initial cause of crash

by Vinay Aggarwal, posted in Troubleshooting Series

What is the VMkernel?

The VMkernel is the operating system core of ESX/ESXi. The kernel handles resource scheduling and device IO. Device IO is handled by the VMware network and storage stacks, which serves as a layer between the virtual file system, network devices and the device drivers that control physical devices.

Continue reading “Decoding PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) of ESXi to find initial cause of crash” →