What are /r/vmware's favorite Products & Services?

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I read the VCP6 Official Study Guide mostly, and a few other sources. I also have 2 years of daily experienced with vSphere 5.1 - 6.5, this was helpful for my comfort with the product, but so much of what you are tested on are things you would never rely on memory for, you'd consult the KB for the correct, current answer.

VCP6-DCV Official Cert Guide

This one is super helpful as well

Veeam Unofficial VCP6-DCV Study Guide

I thought the hard parts of the test were the details of storage protocols, affinity rules and cascading resource reservations and limits.

Good luck!

There's an article discussing disk size here. In summary, you can go with some combination of

• multiple VMDK
• Virtual (non pass-thru) RDMs
• Physical (pass-thru) RDMs

If you went with the VMDK approach you'd have to set up multiple ~2Tb virtual drives then use the guest OS to make your data partition span the drives. The pro on this is you'd have a fully virtual implementation of your VM that could have all the benefits of Virtualization. The con would be that this is a fairly complex setup.

The other options involve using non-virtualized storage so that you are effectively only virtualizing the OS of the file server and connecting to some SAN partition later. This has the pro of being a relatively simple setup and it will be relatively fast. The con would be that certain vMotion type features might be hard to get and your DR scenarios become more complex.

~~So the choice lies with what is more important. Slow but robust or fast but fragile. Naturally, there's a continuum here... just depends on how you want to optimise the setup.~~

EDIT: Based on comments below. VMDK are not slow. You may want to use RDMs to save yourself the effort of copying all those files. Multiple smaller VMDK are preferable for easier backup and restore.

Using Docker, as a reference:

Docker images are intended to be a precompiled set of configuration steps, ready to be deployed into an OS of your choice (much like other kinds of images). Typically you see change control on docker images performed in GitHub. Alternatively, you could store a built docker image in an artifact repository, such as Jfrog, Artifactory, ECR, etc. To create these images you need to build from a dockerfile. The dockerfile, as seen from the link, is very similar to a config script, with the intent that the final step run is the return condition for docker. That is, if whatever is run in that step (usually it's a service of some kind) fails or ends, the container will stop.

Deploying docker containers requires you to have the docker service running on a BaseOS of some kind. Ideally the BaseOS is particularly thin (VMW created PhotonOS for this, but CoreOS is a popular alternative) since all of the libraries and third party components should be in / acquired in the docker image. To perform the deployment you want some config management in place; ansible, systemd, whatever. Context with coreos and systemd.

Why you, /u/derpjutsu, specifically need to use containers is something you'll need to figure out. Usually the benefit of containers come from their small footprint, strict control (from a security perspective), easy accessibility in a microservice architecture, and natural fit into an "infrastructure-as-code" environment.

WinSCP:

https://winscp.net/eng/download.php

Handy dandy. Along with PuTTY, about the most used utility in mixed-OS environments. No machine should be without them.

Im personally not the biggest fan on designs that involve an ISL between the storage switches.

IMO, when you do this, you create a single failure domain out what could be 2 failure domains. Creating an ISL creates a way for those switches to impact each other, and possibly have one bring down the other. I've seen it happen in real, live production environments.

Does going the other way (total isolation) limit how many paths you can use in a failure scenario? Yes. To me, its worth it prevent a much worse scenario.

The CPU isn't going to be your issue. The amount of RAM and disks are going to be the things to focus on. 16GB would be the minimum IMO and I'd get at least one SSD (more would be better) as running all those VMs on a HDD would be miserable.

Might also want to look into Microsoft virtual labs, may give you what you need without having to buy anything. Another option might be AWS free tier account. https://aws.amazon.com/free/faqs/?ft=nf

If you're planning on using this system in the future I'd spend the money now and do it properly (good CPU, RAM, SSD)

I'm interested in an experienced opinion on this too. I've seen hardware versions at 4. Is that doing a disservice to the vm? Is it that big of a deal? In all my studies they drive home keeping this updated as you go for drivers and functionality. One Answer

Here is a good write up, if fsck does find a orphaned file, it's likely it will put it into lost+found folder. Might be worth taking a peak there first before even running fsck (in case it already ran itself).

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-recover-from-file-system-corruption-using-fsck-and-a-recovery-iso

I'm not much of a linux guru, I just know windows has something similar where it can find orphaned files with a disk check, however you have to rename it and move it back into place. It's really likely the original file could also be damaged right now since you had the filesystem mounted in read/write.

You could look at Virtual Desktops. I am on the mac now but in my Windows XP days I used to use them all the time.

http://www.howtogeek.com/195962/unlock-virtual-desktops-on-windows-7-or-8-with-this-microsoft-tool/

If you want a Windows iso, google "Digital River Windows {version} download". It should get you your media, but you're still on the hook for licensing.

http://www.howtogeek.com/186775/how-to-download-windows-7-8-and-8.1-installation-media-legally/

I've been running a few virtualized SQL instances for a while now.

As /u/basedcharley says, you're not going to be able to live vMotion your cluster nodes. You will have to shut the node down and then move it, and bring it back online. If you're running a single clustered instance of SQL on the cluster, then this will end up only requiring one failover. I have one cluster that has 6 SQL instances, and since the instances are balanced between nodes (3 on each), I have to fail each instance over twice to get back to standard. As far as I know, there is no supported way around this. You need shared storage, and raw disk mappings on a separate SCSI bus is the only way to achieve this (native to VMware). I believe that guest iSCSI is also supported by MS.

I've noticed that on my RDMs, a Path Selection Policy of 'Fixed' provides the best performance. YMMV, but the best way to check this is use perfmon. This guide spells it all pretty well.

Post I made when I ran into the same issue you are having:

OK, new active directory setup using Server 2K8 R2. One physical node (hulkhogan) and 2 virtual nodes running on the same VM host (machoman and brethart), these will be clustered file servers and probably print servers [cluster in a box]. Everything was fine until I upgraded the host to VSphere 5.0. I started getting all sorts of nonsense. Couldn't login, wouldn't keep saved logins, I happen to notice that the time was WAY off. Like 2 years off ... Double checked NTP settings, they were set right but wouldn't change time because 2 years is outside the allowed delta. I changed date/time on the 2 VMs, rebooted, went back to 2 years off. Check the bios of the VM, same thing, could set it then upon reboot it was 2 years out again. Turned out my new VM host's hardware clock was 2 years off?! I just assumed adding to the existing VMWare cluster it would sync with the VCenter server or one of the other hosts. So I fixed that thru the VCenter GUI, time started working again. Then I noticed active directory changes weren't getting pushed around though, user groups, file security, etc only existed on one server and wasn't propegating properly. Lots of "Event ID 2042: It has been too long since this machine replicated" errors in the server logs for all three servers. I ended up having to make a reg change to get them to sync.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\NTDS\Parameters\Allow Replication With Divergent and Corrupt Partner

Dword: 1 (1 = allow, 0 = disallow)

Let it sync, once replication was showing no errors (repadmin /showrepl) I set that key to be 0. Hopefully this won't happen again but from perusing the internet not many have had this exact issue ...

References:

http://tigermatt.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/windows-time-for-active-directory/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757610%28WS.10%29.aspx

Already look through gpresult /r ? May even be worth looking through gpresult /v

I would check this as well:

> Enabling logging > > In addition to logging events in the Application Event log, Folder Redirection can provide a detailed log to aid troubleshooting. To create > a detailed log file for folder redirection, use the following registry key: > > HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics > > Set: FdeployDebugLevel = Reg_DWORD 0x0f > > Note > The log file can be found at: %windir%\debug\usermode\fdeploy.log > > http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc775423(v=ws.10).aspx

I recommend Mastering vSphere 5 by Scott Lowe along with Pluralsight - Jason Nash - VCAP Optimize & Scale videos. I also used some of the deep dives from vmworld conferences to get a better understanding of some of my weaker points.

Here's one of the VCP study guides I used. https://mega.nz/#!YNMQnCaI!F6WrVXBAUZFUTpmUTVvBSUMxqNbhwHcbPFvbOMDLB60

Feel free to message me for any questions/help with your study.

Remember this will uninstall the key, but Microsoft still associates it with the hardware on their activation servers, which may give you an issue when you try to reactivate on different physical hardware.

here is the full list of Windows console activation commands.

CBT Nuggets provide a large library of training videos for a range of different technologies. I love them and use them when I'm wanting to learn something new, before I start reading up on the finer details: http://www.cbtnuggets.com/

Depends on what you mean by VMware. VMware produces a number of different virtualization products. I work with Workstation and vSphere (aka ESX) on a daily basis. Both support floppy images just fine. Simply configure the VM's floppy drive to use the image on your local machine.

I would suggest looking into Bochs rather than VMware for this sort of thing. I did some hobby OS dev back in high school and if I remember correctly VMware is not ideal for this sort of low level work. Can't recall the specifics but some searching should turn up details. You might try asking around in r/osdev.

I use a repackaging software or write my own installer using nsis http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page if possible. I would not do it by hand at all.

Most shitty software that is like that isn’t doing a lot to begin with so repackaging isn’t hard.

We use MindArray Minder to monitor ESXi. It supports SNMP as well as VMWare APIs for monitoring. If you are looking for exhaustive statistics then I would suggest to go for VMWare API based monitoring. VMWare API allows you to capture much more information from MIBs, which cannot be done by SNMP and even basic control operations are possible by VMWare API which is not possible using SNMP.

Just to be sure I understand what you're asking - You want to know why traffic from the (virtual) guest isn't wrapped in the VPN tunnel running on the (physical) host?

VM software creates a virtual switch at the host level, so there's an added layer there - otherwise you wouldn't be able to use different IP addresses on the different guests/host. When you VPN from the host, it's going through its own port on the switch.

I don't have much experience with OracleBox, but to my knowledge, if you wanted to wrap all outgoing connections from the machine in the VPN, you'd need a separate device between your physical host and your internet gateway to manage the VPN tunnel. Like I said, I don't have a lot of experience with OracleBox, so there might be something in the settings for that virtual switch that allows the traffic behavior you're looking for, but as far as I know, it doesn't work that way.

Edit: I assume you're doing this from home? Depending on your VPN service, installing something like Tomato or WRT on your consumer-grade router might give you the option to tunnel all connections from your home through your VPN. If you're doing this in a corporate environment, there's a bunch of options - most firewalls in routed mode will give you the option to create a point to point VPN tunnel for specified subnets.

whats the error? have you tried resizing the target disk? It may not be a limitation of the converter, but actually your version of vSphere with the 2TB limit. 5.5 removed the 2TB limit with the VMFS5. Anything lower and your sol.

you can also give these two a try if your environment is up to spec.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm

If you end up unable to get the reverse proxy working appropriately, you might consider an RDP bastion host and something like Trasa or Apache Guacamole in front.

I'm trying very hard not to be an ass here but you have answered all of my questions and given exactly zero useful information as to what you are trying to accomplish. If you just want to spin up VMs on your PC go check out VirtualBox. Otherwise, I will repeat, what are you wanting to do?

>How can I make the 2 NICs act as 2 separate ports on a conventional switch would?

I've been in your situation---you're looking to extend the vSwitch bridge out to the physical NICs, but unfortunately ESXi just doesn't work like that. There's a lot of reasons that it doesn't, and most of them are along the lines of "because computers normally don't behave like switches" or "because switching packets with x86 CPUs is extremely resource intensive."

What you'll need to do is create two vswitches, assign a NIC to each one, and then connect something like a VyOS VM to both vSwitches. Or use PCI Passthrough to put the 10G NIC into the VyOS VM, give it a vmxnet3 NIC attached to your regular vSwitch... something like that.

If VyOS is too tough to configure, you can do bridging like this in pfSense too, but I never got it to work right under full load.

There should be an option in the snapshot process to “include physical memory”. If I recall, it’s not checked by default and is hidden in an arrow drop down. Here’s a link, couldn’t find on for ESXi 5.5; but hopefully it should be close enough for you. https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vmware-snapshots-vsphere-how-to/

Are you looking to perform memory forensics using the .vmem or do you need it for something else?

What’s to backup? The point of the Chrome based systems is that everything is in the Google Cloud.

The closest thing to what you are describing is Neverware

"Note: The functionality of this Fling has been integrated into the product vSphere Mobile Watchlist in app stores. Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vmware.beacon&hl=en iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-vsphere-mobile-watchlist/id792869677?mt=8 For questions about this product: see this community VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) will no longer be updated."

That's what Amazon state, so it's fair to say VMware would be the same.

>While the updates AWS performs protect underlying infrastructure, in order to be fully protected against these issues, customers must also patch their instance operating systems.

AWS Disclosure

> We are a huge Windows shop and if I'm not mistaken, Azure allows you to utilize the existing licenses that we are already using for on-prem. AWS does not.

If you are using dedicated hosts with AWS then it looks like you can bring the licenses, see https://aws.amazon.com/windows/resources/licensing/#dedicated

Given that, from what I have heard, VMware is using physical hosts from AWS it could potentially be treatable as a dedicated host for licensing purposes. This is all pre-release though so I would take that with a big pinch of salt until it actually ships and more details are available!

On #1: I'm not so sure. Here is the reference on TechNet. It says the NAS limitation is for RTM but not for SP1 or SP2.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj126252%28v=exchg.141%29.aspx#BKMK_Prereq

Either way I've done configurations like this in the past and it worked out fine.

Yes to the 90 w comment. A system by itself with 1 x 140mm fan, no hard disks but a USB flash disk attached will pull ~30w. Add a high end RAID controller and one 7200RPM disk and that goes to ~50w. A Xeon x3220 has a TDP of 105w, I'd be pretty confident in saying it'll pull at LEAST 80w on idle. The difference between the current generation of CPUs and older (i.e. core-2-duo era) CPUs is the idle states in the newer CPUs are a LOT more efficient. For e.g. a Core i5 2500 CPU will idle at something like <10w (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/21)

The reason the AMD is more power efficient is it's built for situations where space / cooling / power are major constraints. It's not the best for server workloads, but for a home server where it'll likely be sitting at idle for 90% of the time, it's not worth the power penalty of a older Xeon.

A newer i5 or i7 CPU would be significantly better in both idle power consumption and firepower.

Oh, this gets into a somewhat shady area, but I have used a utility called VM Tweaker in the past for various R&D type side projects. It may have a few options that you find helpful in some ways with regard to hardware trickery. Although somewhat difficult, you can find BIOS images if you look hard enough (maybe even bin files straight from the vendor?), and there are probably utilities you can use to create BIOS images yourself.

That Brian Madden article is the good about the Citrix spin. This ZD net piece also tries to decipher the stupid marketing spin on this. Why can't they simply state what is new instead of just re-branding and creating stupid marketing sheets that are painful to read.

http://www.zdnet.com/vmwares-horizon-6-launches-targets-citrix-7000028214/

One thing that I think Madden got incorrect is he mentions that vCOPs for View is now included. I think that is only if you get the top Horizon Enterprise edition. The other editions do not include this still.

I don't know how you do it on this specific model but what you need to do is make sure that the entire certificate chain is on the Zero Clients. This means all intermediary and root certs must be on the Zero clients.

Edit: It appears that you can find the instructions for uploading the certificate here on page 281.

Also if you just Google that error you should have found the solution. Part of being a good sysadmin is doing some quick Googling.

The reason there aren't any atoms on the HCL is because they do not support Intel VT, and they will probably perform badly due to the small L2 and L3 cache.

If you are looking for a small form factor I would look at the new sandybridge based i7 mini-itx boards. If you are not looking for local storage most of them would work fine with an additional network card. Its not the CPU that is the thing that ESXi does not like, its the storage and network controllers.

I also have this board at home, I can see if ESXi boots on it if that would be helpful.

I guess the first things to do would be to look at graphics memory and processor utilisation. If you're using a dedicated GPU it's unlikely, but using any onboard graphics it may be that the system simply can't handle it that well...

It sounds to me like workstation isn't quite what you want though. Have you considered using X-Server to do this sort of thing? Something like XMing might work well for you. I've used it previously with great success, although that was when I was new to Linux and I had a guru leading me through the setup. Haven't used it since as my main interaction is on my desktop at work and my servers at home. Desktop is Linux, and I RDP into Windows VMs when required (backwards from how most work, but it does the job), and at home I use terminal only Linux machines since I simply don't need the drag of having a desktop environment running. Probably worth a shot though. It's basically the Unity feature of VMWare, but free, external, and in my experience faster than VMWare. Although I've not used VMWare Unity feature, I can say that having used vSphere from VMWare, the interface is much friendlier in X-server systems.

Edit, of course VMWare is virtualisation technology, but if you're hosting on Windows you may even do better to use Hyper-V as your hypervisor, instead of VMWare, then use X-server to connect to them and handle all windows over SSH. As they are on the same machine latency should be quite low and it should be very useable.

> But honestly, I don't yet know how to do that and how to apply this change permanently (so I don't have to re-execute those commands after each restart).

/etc/sysctl.conf

See man sysctl.conf

Also, I would encourage you to update these systems to atleast 8.4. 8.3 is no longer supported by the community. The 8-STABLE branch is legacy now. I'm not sure how long it will be supported as well. You should be planning on upgrading or replacing these VMs to the latest production release (10.0) soon.

i would follow this so it automounts the folder with your games in it. so you just have to type in the name of the game exe to launch it. also to go full screen its control - F10. Also if games run too fast or to slow control -F11 and F12 will adjust that

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Basic_Setup_and_Installation_of_DosBox#Automatically_Mounting_Your_DOS_Games_folder

Not PowerCLI / PowerShell, but I use plink.exe (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html), you can run:

plink -l root -pw mypassword esx01 "/vmfs/volumes/xxxx/scripts/backup.sh"

To avoid blank password in your scripts, you can create ssh key with puttygen and use it, some like:

plink -l root -i C:\blah\myfile.ppk esx01 "/vmfs/volumes/xxxx/scripts/backup.sh"

The officially documented process for formatting USB media is here and requires Linux. As other have said, you can also use Windows with the utility Rufus.

First KB hit points to upgrading your host drivers.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/464885

This EE post also points to improper drivers throwing that error http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/VMWare/Q_28393999.html

I'd start there.

What you need to do is use vmkfstools to make a .vmdk file which represents the block device. You can then add that as an "existing" drive like any other vmdk to a vm.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/VMWare/A_9174-HOW-TO-Add-Local-Storage-e-g-a-SATA-disk-as-a-Raw-Disk-Mapping-RDM-or-Mapped-RAW-LUN-to-a-virtual-machine-hosted-on-ESXi.html

Thanks for the explanation.

The USB 3 solution is clunky, I agree. At the time of purchase, I was unaware of better solutions like FreeNAS + iSCSI.

Sure, a bit old but still valid: VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices

Also - Serverfault discussion on the topic.

I know several compagny going back to Citrix XenServer or KVM due to the lack of vSphere client on Linux/OSX. IMO this is a big drawback of esxi, because i have to virtualize a windows only to manage my host. You should give a look at Archipel project. It's an "in-browser" manager, base on Libvirt and XMPP.

Without allowing RDP into the guests that's going to be difficult. RDP really is your best solution. It's worth making the case for. There shouldn't be a security concern if it's managed properly and it sounds like your environment is run pretty tight.

If RDP is absolutely not a possibility there are a couple of other options you might investigate:

• The vSphere Web Client allows for accessing the console. It works very well. We've been moving our VM owners away from the desktop client and over to this. A quick packet capture suggests that it connects directly to the ESX host without tunneling through vCenter. I can't be sure but I think your vCenter license entitles you to any number of web client instances. The major caveat is that it probably requires vCenter 5.

• Install an alternative remote client on the guest. Something like Dameware would likely work well. I haven't used it myself since the Windows 2000 days but as I recall it was top notch. VNC would work as well but I'd consider it more of a last resort personally.

Has anyone tried this? How well does it scale? I tried this but we have so many hosts and VMs it would take about 4 minutes to render any screen. Even with that being the only thing on the Grafana machine with 16 vCPUs and 128GB RAM, it was so slow Grafana would try to refresh the screen before it could draw it the first time.

Use the pre existing templates. Follow the steps given here : https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manual/vm_monitoring

After adding vcenter let zabbix run for 30 minutes auto discovering everything and you are golden.

IIRC there are some config changes required on the zabbix server to enable the vcenter pollers, a quick google search should clear it up.

I've been running zabbix for 2 years now on 3 different sites and it works fantastically, very low touch with great historic metrics and reports

There's a lot of possible misconceptions in your post, and youve mentioned being in a hurry which is doubly concerning. I would heavily caution you vs messing with viruses at all. If it's a file, upload it to https://www.virustotal.com/gui/. It's unlikely you are going to know if its a virus more than all the professional av products. If it's a url, put it into something like https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/ and let the sandbox tell you what it finds first. You can put the file into hybrid also for sandboxing.

Assuming the only vector you are worried about is the wifi router (which again is probably wrong), You would have one small level of protection, as long as the vpn does not allow local network access while you are connected. You should also be sure the vm has no saved credentials or active sessions to the router. And your router should definitely not have a default password.

However, there is nothing stopping some theoretical virus from stopping your vpn and then connecting to your router or other machines on the network. If I was writing malware with the goal of taking over home routers (something I've actually done), or attempting to do any network related infecting, killing a vpn process first would be a pretty obvious feature.

Use a single IP to load up all the URLS you want. Have all the DNS names resolve to the Squid box. Then from there squid can look at the host headers of the incoming traffic and direct the packets to the appropriate server.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software)

http://www.squid-cache.org/

Can you use a software tool like Veeam to backup the VMs first, then delete all snapshots? If those machines are currently running fine and without issue, I see no reason to not delete the snapshots. Snapshots are not backups and they can really reduce the performance of the VMs as well.

Here is a script I use to find any snapshots in our environment older than 2 days.

param ( $Age = 2 )

Connect-VIServer vcenter.fqdn.domain $vm = Get-VM $snapshots = Get-Snapshot -VM $vm Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "Old snapshots found:" foreach ( $snap in $snapshots ) { if ( $snap.Created -lt (Get-Date).AddDays( -$Age ) ) { Write-Host "Name: " $snap.VM " Size: " $snap.SizeGB " Created: " $snap.Created } }

Veeam Agent will do so (also free). It can drop backups to an SMB share fairly easily. The down side is it happens from inside the VM so needs to be installed on each VM. ANything not VM based will probably need a licensed version of ESXi. GhettoVCB doesn't I don't think, but you're going to want to be comfortable with command line interactions to use it

Hi JD,

What is the reason for stopping the vpxd service prior to backing up the database? I seen it was also in the VMware instructions although pg_dump is a utility which will perform "consistent" backups of the database weather it is in use or not.

Here is a link to the pg_dump article: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/app-pgdump.html

If any one could clear this up, that would be great. I wrote a script to backup our embedded vpostgres DB, it utilizes pg_dump and it does not stop the vpxd service. I have tested the backups a few times now each time without issue.

From what I can tell this is an old best practice which may not be required anymore? correct me if I am wrong because I'm not a database expert :)

It would appear no one has played with this much :P

Thin provisioning only works when VMWare sees the .vmdk file has blank data (like 0's) at the end of the file, when you do a Storage vMotion it then releases that space at the end of the drive back to the datastore and shrinks the used space on the VM. If you for whatever reason fill up the drive, but delete half the data it will NOT release and shrink the disk. The easiest solution I have found is a Microsoft utility called 'sdelete' It goes through and fills the harddrive up (essentially 0'ing free space) then deletes the temp file. After that perform the migration and it will shrink the used space of the drive :)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443

It depends on the OS, though justchillin has the best response to this thread. for linux I think this will help

As for microsoft, I would guess it would involve hyper-v, maybe read this

To everyone here- Clearly, this is an example of things going horribly wrong, and if we(VMware) can do anything to remedy this, we'll be all over it.

I just want everyone to know if they have any issues at all with VMware Support or Licensing, to reach out to me. I'm on Twitter as @vmwarecares, and I'm constantly on the lookout for customer-care issues that I can assist with. If you don't use Twitter, I'm on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/pages/VMware-Cares/181417555233192

I use this instead of Sysprep to get around the SID issues

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897418 - This is the explanation and the debunk of the myth of SID duplication (though I still use this because I'm paranoid like that)

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B3FY671u4qSFNDk0NDk5NmUtMWVjMy00YTU1LTgzZDItYTQxYzVhNjZmYmIz&amp;hl=en

Yes, DB25 to DB9 to USB should work fine. You should only need drivers in the guest.

That one you linked looks fine, though I have much more personal experience with the ones using an FTDI chipset, like this one that I have.

The best thing I ever did to really understand on paper the way host acts is buy this book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540873064/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_D2JSAZAE70NWWDVK7WEB

It's a convoluted answer on how to apply vcpu. Your biggest challenge will be outside software companies and IT admins that have managed bare metal for many years telling you they need way more than they actually do, it took me some time to get over it myself.

A good learning practice if you have the option is using RV tools to monitor and over saturate/subscribe a host with 6+ vm and do various activities in the os of each. Keeping in mind all the other variables that go into the things your doing.

First, I'd suggest trying all USB ports - including any internal headers - in case you didn't pass all of them through.

Failing that, it should be a problem you can solve with money, by purchasing a cheap PCIe USB card.

SuperMicro SuperServer 5019D-FN8TP - Rack-Mountable - Xeon D-2146NT - 0 GB https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D24HK84/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_fR.1FbX9S91QX?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

I’ve had my eye on this for a while now. Anyone had any experience with this lineup?

I have virtulised large four socket SQL servers like this in the past with no real issues, here are some of the things I did to optimise performance.

Make sure the VM matches the underlying NUMA architecture. With this kind of Hardware, I would recommend setting the VM to four sockets with nine cores each for a total of 36 cores. If this is undersized, keep scaling up per core whilst keeping an eye on VMWAIT times in ESXTOP, as this will kill your performance. Once you go over ten the host will start scheduling HT cores to the VM. I would leave one physical core free per socket for the hypervisor. Always leave hyper-threading enabled, as the hypervisor will use this for scheduling.

In the guest, run Coreinfo from sysinternals to check that vNuma is doing it's thing https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722.aspx

Make sure the BIOS is set to maximum performance with no power saving features enabled, as this will cause some funky performance issues.

Make sure you are using VMXNET3 Nics and Paravirtual SCSI controllers. Try and seperate TempDB and logs to its own seperate Paravirtual SCSI controller for maximum storage performance.

If you want to read up more on this, I highly recommend the book "Virtualising SQL Server with VMware, doing it right", its available on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Virtualizing-SQL-Server-VMware-Technology/dp/0321927753

There is an excellent book avaiable titled "VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive" that is all things vSAN and really digs into interworkings. You can read it for free if you are an Amazon Prime member. It is from the VMware vSphere Deep Dive series of books. I am running an all flash vSAN in my lab as well and the details from this book has filled in a lot of wholes.

As far as vSAN performance evaluation, check out the HCIBenchmark VMware fling. I just started playing with it last week and it is really slick!

I ran into exactly the same problem. You have to disconnect NordVPN, start VMware Workstation and the virtual machine and then you can immediately reconnect to NordVPN again and the virtual machine starts as expected.

vSphere Design: 2nd edition.

Also, munch on as many VMworld videos as you can.

I always recommend this book for anyone to dive into this understanding.

All these posts are different ways of explaining it. My go-to is to think of a physical setup.

• router(Gateway) - Physical switch - cable - server(this has a gateway configured)

For a VM a virtual switch is like a switch so it just goes in-between

• router(Gateway) - Physical switch - cable - virtual switch - VM(this has a gateway configured)

But the ESXi host needs interfaces(VMK's) so it uses the virtual switch like a VM.

• router(Gateway) - Physical switch - cable - virtual switch - VMK(this has a gateway configured - Default stack)

Since the program you are talking about is running in full-screen mode, your guest OS can not override the resolution settings, and VMware Player has to do this. Unfortunately Player is not capable of doing this. Upgrade to VMware Workstation or free Virtualbox https://www.virtualbox.org/. The Windows 10 built-in Hyper-V might also do the job.

An alternative option would be using some VNC client to connect to your guest over the network. That approach may allow you to change and stretch the resolution as you want.

> Also has LXC containers, which I think VMware is trying to add something similar.

Sort of, this is a pretty good breakdown of what's currently been released in this area and how they fit together:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sorting-out-vmwares-container-technologies-kenneth-hui

The official cert guide from VMware Press is really good.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/VCP-DCV-Official-Guide-Vmware-Certification/dp/0135898196

If you get the guide from Pearson directly, you have the option to buy it with some practice exams.

For headless I’ve always seen people use dummy hdmi out:

https://www.amazon.com/Headless-Display-Emulator-Headless-1920x1080-Generation/dp/B06XT1Z9TF/ref=asc_df_B06XT1Z9TF/?tag=hyprod-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=309751315916&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=4511192835022627794&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptw...

There is a lot more info and troubleshooting needed to really narrow it down.

• You mentioned USB-C, is this the compact workstation? If so I presume you mean the front panel USB-C? Is there a cable going from this port to the motherboard? If so, try and disconnect it.
  • USB ports go to a USB chip that is eventually dumped onto the PCIe bus on the motherboard. If a port has a problem it might be messing with the PCIe lane that the onboard NIC chip also dumps onto.
• Try disabling just the front USB ports in BIOS
• Have you ensured all Virtualization options are enabled in BIOS?
  • This includes VT for Direct I/O
• Do you have this problem bare metal?
  • Install Ubuntu or windows and put the network through some tests.
• Do you have a spare PCIe/USB networking card?
  • Steel one from another computer if they have one. Amazon has them for 15 bucks cheap. If that works, perhaps a compatibility issue with the onboard NIC.

I'm new to all this and I got a LSI 9260 8i to find out there is no way it would work. Later I did buy another card from Amazon and it worked great no mucking around needed just passed it though to TrueNAS and its running with two drives as we speak.

Wish I knew more to help get yours going but figured. Hopefully some has some insight.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08QJCQ76S?psc=1&amp;ref=ppx\_yo2\_dt\_b\_product\_details

I started using Supermicro 5028D-TN4T boxes. It’s got 8 CPUs and can be loaded out with 128GB of RAM if desired. Built in 10G and IPMI. They only difference I did was move the board into a small 2U chassis. I now have a couple more of these and do VSAN using this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M0BIPYC/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_T64D9FZQ9G2F7TG5Q31M?psc=1

This isn't really a VMware question...?

What you're looking for is a "VPN kill switch." NordVPN has this functionality out-of-the-box, and I'd assume many other VPN programs do as well.

Again, please excuse my noobishness this project was a new endeavor from a random thought I had earlier today. So sorta spur of the moment and I’m uneducated. When making a vm in network settings it has 4 different options. I got some reason was under the impression one of thr 4 was a way to ‘some how’ allow me to only rely on a vpn connection.

I use ExpressVPN, they claim to have a built in kill switch that promises you even if connection is loss, no packets will go out as they’ll keep you from reconnecting. But I’ve found this doesn’t always “work” because I’ve came home to vpn disconnected, and reconnected to my regular internet and still seeing torrents flying in and out.

So it makes me wish their was a way to only force a vpn connection and if not connected; stay dead. Any ideas? Tricks? Windows 10 pro.

If you find books to be helpful, this one is a good one: https://www.amazon.com/VCP-DCV-Official-Guide-VMware-Certification/dp/0135898196

The authors are all VCIs and teach the courses required for the cert.

I was able to run my entire home lab using this a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-T5-Portable-SSD-MU-PA1T0B/dp/B073H552FJ. Thing though is that it was connected to a desktop with core i7 and 32GB if memory so probably a bit more powerful than your laptop but you can give that a try.

Unfortunately without other physics NICs, you really have none. The only other option is to use the PCI-E NVMe slot.

You can buy an adapter that adapts the m2 slot of the NUC and converts it into an x4 PCI slot. Then you can install a NIC.

ADT-Link M.2 NGFF NVMe Key M Extender Cable to PCIE x16 Graphics Card Riser Adapter 16x PCI-e PCI-Express for M2 2230 2242 2260 2280 (25cm) https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07YDH8KW9/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_5BRQEPVGCFR6XHZ5KA76?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

But you’ll have to work out another way for storage. But you can use USB key for your esxi

I'm not sure which Minecraft version you're after (Microsoft Store or the client), but I tried it a couple of times, in VMware Workstation. The issue I had was mouse capture, even with tools installed, just basically spun you in circles.

This happened with both the MS store version and the one from Minecraft.net. Could've been just me and my experience however.

That might be a Wayland issue then:

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#apps-in-gnome-on-wayland

See if you can switch it to Xorg and that might fix it. Otherwise, there's probably a way in Gnome to disable whatever other passive key bindings is hooking that, but you're outside my expertise now.

Whats the build number of the client you are using? I'd start by making sure your on the latest version.

Here's link to download latest (Build 1993072 for 5.5)

Theres also a link there for the version 6 client.

http://superuser.com/questions/439356/where-can-i-find-the-vmware-vsphere-client

TKCs havePodSecurityPolicies enabled by default — you have to either bind them to your Deployments Namespace or it’s specific ServiceAccount.

These have (almost) nothing to do with the owner/edit/view permissions you assign to your vSphere Namespaces!

It seems like you have to reinstall your host operating system. If you are running Windows 10, try installing the latest major update. That might fix the issue.
As an alternative, you can try using VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/. It is not as great as VMware Workstation but allows you to run the same virtual machines you already have and might be a quick and temporary workaround till you have the initial problem fixed.

As already mentioned above, you have to perform a clean native uninstall of the VMware Player before installing Workstation since it looks like your previous uninstallation wasn't clean and complete. If it doesn't work with the current version as you have mentioned, you can try using the previous version installer for this purpose. Just install it once again, reboot the machine and make sure everything is working fine and then remove it using its native uninstaller completely. Try installing Workstation afterward.

If using VMware product is not mandatory and you simply need to run some virtual machines you can stick to Hyper-V which is already present in your Windows 10 installation or Virtualbox https://www.virtualbox.org/.

To separate traffic from your main network, you will need to create a new VLAN or broadcast domain on your network. This means you will need to configure the ports on your switch to carry VLAN tagged traffic from one node to the next. If your switches do not support VLAN traffic (unmanaged switches), then you will need to use a separate physical switch and separate physical uplinks per host to the new switch, each attached to a new vSwitch or DvSwitch on your hosts. If you're talking about a single host, then you don't need to worry about switching at all, just create a new vSwitch or DvSwitch with no uplinks on your single host.

Then, if you want the VMs on this network to have internet access, you will need to create or connect a router to the new network. The router can be a physical router attached to the switch, and tagged on the same VLAN as the new network. Or, you can deploy a VM. In both cases, the router will need two interfaces. One interface in the main network that can reach your router at 192.168.0.1, and one interface within the new network that VMs can use as their gateway. I suggest something like pfSense or VyOS. Also, you can even add an interface or virtual interface to your existing router if it supports VLAN tagging.

Good luck!

https://app.any.run/

This is an online service that allows you, for free, to run a program in a Windows 7 32 bit environment for 60 seconds. The major caveat is your test runs are public. It has great features, such as file access and network access logs.

https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vmware-workstation-pro-vs-player/

>VMware Workstation Pro provides the following features and VM options that are not available in VMware Player:

Guest Isolation. You can enable or disable using drag & drop and copy/paste features from a host to guest and the inverse. Disable these features in addition to disabling networking if you would like your VM to be completely isolated from the host OS. VMware Tools must be installed on a guest OS to make the guest isolation feature available.

> Amazon AWS buying VMware from Dell.

I think you mean VMware on AWS.

Otherwise, that would be the end of VMware. Amazon would let the technology die and force everyone into using their solutions.

you need the ISO. the setup file you have should be run on an existing system to go out to Microsoft and download the ISO to a temporary directory on that machine. you can then burn that ISO to a DVD or make a bootable USB device to load up on your new system. Since you're using VBox, you can just mount the ISO in your VM.

Here's a link to the download site on TechNet: Windows 8 Evaluation

The problem with restoring AD controllers from snapshots exists with USNs (generated from a RID and IID). When an AD VM is rolled back, previously used USN combos are reused with a new change on that controller, and replication fails. With VM-Generation ID, the controller checks the ID value stored in AD against the one reported to it by the hypervisor. If it's different (which it is when the VM is rolled back/cloned), it disposes of the RID pool and IID, meaning the same USN combo won't be reused.

There's no way in which this can fail, and it's been heavily tested by both Microsoft (it was originally designed with Hyper-V in mind) and VMware. There are more safeguards in place, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831734.aspx#virtualized_dc_cloning

As long as you have more than one AD controller and GC, there's no real problem here - even with application that rely on AD. I don't see the issue here.

You can use iSCSI or NFS. It really depends on personal preference. If you decide to go with iSCSI, please manually check that automount is disabled on the OS; Especially if you have any remote possibility of adding the source LUNs/datastores to the VBR server.

Also since space is mentioned you may want to look into defragmenting your guest OSs then running sdelete -r -z VOLUME (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx). This will save space on the VM if it is thin provisioned and will save space on replicas if they are using thin disks. Just a word of caution--I've heard Exchange doesn't like defrag.

Check ELK stack - elastic search / logstash / filebeat / kibana not easy to setup but very powerfull some netflow example here https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/mynog/diy-netflow-data-analytic-with-elk-stack-by-cl-lee

Also fluentd can be used instead filebeat / logstash

That literally shows in the photo that you have to plug in a SATA cable if you're using a SATA keyed M.2 drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-Expansion/dp/B07JKH5VTL

Look at the third photo.

I think it was System Rescue but it’s been a minute. I’m pretty sure any Linux Rescue ISO on Distro Watch would probably work. Most of them have OpenVM tools installed so they’ll recognize the NIC, and I think some will even mount the drives automatically in R/O. Best of luck!!

Thanks for the response, sadly this is happening in my Homelab so I dont have a Support contract to open a SR. I have the output here: https://hastebin.com/cudifiweye.sql as well as the config file (with passwords stripped) here https://hastebin.com/ocijagoher.json

I like this website for finding alternative software: https://alternativeto.net/software/powerchute-personal-edition/

Of these options I would go with the commercial SunBird option, the Open Source stuff doesn't appear to be well supported.

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/8162 here is described how to get the datastore dashboard and collection of data for example (telegraf )
I am confident sure that there will be a similar for snapshots somewhere

if I remember correctly Sexigraf had this, so it is possible to collect them. have a look there maybe it will help .

you mentioned that you use the dashboard, but how do you collect the data? this is why you do not see any info.

Grafana is mostly for time-series data. For general dashboard stuff we use metabase which is epic. Just hook it up to a database and you can build really cool looking dashboards very easily.

Regarding getting your data into SQL, it really is not that difficult. Use the PowerCLI commands to get the data you want and then use the Invoke-SqlCmd function from the SqlServer powershell module to push that to your database using SQL statements. This is the setup I use at work with great success. Good luck!

If it's just for a few VMs I'd use Veeam Community Edition which is free for just a few. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Last I checked VMware Replication backs up to itself and then sends the dedup bits over the wire. It can take a lot of space.

Depending on what those VMs have on them, you could also look at writing them up as code in Terraform and/or Ansible that you can use to rebuild on demand to VMware or even Azure. After they are built, you could just restore from backups onto the newly built servers. Of course, this makes the issue more of a backups problem - where do they go and how fast can they get there.

Ah, see I knocked all my P2V's down during the conversion process :)

Used an awesome Microsoft utility SDelete to actually 0 the unused space so when we converted I could properly size the drives.

And I guess it's just different approaches. I'd much rather have to go to the one or two VM's that use more than my 40GB C:\ for Server 2008 and expand as needed than over allocate and give them 100GB to fill up with garbage (every installer known to man, etc)