Quick HowTo/reminder to myself on how to activate TPM on ESXi hosts connected to vCenter. The smoothest way is to configure the servers before they are connected to vCenter: Otherwise they must be removed from the inventory and re-added. The BIOS security settings must be correctly configured: Select System Security. TPM Security must be turned… Continue reading Set up TPM support in vCenter on Dell R7515
Category: VMware
Fixing vSAN driver compatibility on Dell R7515
A while back, we purchased some vSAN Ready nodes for a new cluster. The machines came with ESXi installed in an all-NVMe configuration, but when setting up vSAN, Skyline Health kept complaining that the driver used for the write-intensive cache drives wasn’t certified for this purpose. I opened support cases with both VMware and Dell… Continue reading Fixing vSAN driver compatibility on Dell R7515
Troubleshooting vSphere update woes
It’s 2020 and I still occasionally stumble on products that can’t handle international characters. I’ve been running my update rounds on our vSphere environment, but one host simply refused to perform is update compliance check. To troubleshoot, I enabled the ssh service and remoted in to the host, looking for errors in /var/log/vua.log. Sure enough,… Continue reading Troubleshooting vSphere update woes
When the French attack…
A consultant working with our Alcatel phone system encountered a weird issue that caused us some problems the other day. When attempting to install an Open Touch Media Server (used for receiving fax, for example), the entire vCenter client environment froze, and a reload of the page resulted in the following error message: 503 Service… Continue reading When the French attack…
Manually removing ghost vVols from IBM SVC-based storage
As part of my evaluation of presenting vVols to vCenter from an IBM FlashSystem V9000, I decided to start from scratch after learning a bit about the benefits and limitations of the system. That is: I like vVols a lot, but I learned some things in my tests that I wanted to do differently in… Continue reading Manually removing ghost vVols from IBM SVC-based storage
VMware Storage Providers and Certificate issues
While trying to test out vVols in our vSphere 6.5 environment, presented via IBM Spectrum Control Base 3.2 from a StoreWize V9000 SAN, I ran into a small issue that took me a while to figure out: I installed Spectrum Control Base 3.2 and presented its web services via a FQDN. To avoid the nagging… Continue reading VMware Storage Providers and Certificate issues
The paravirtual SCSI controller and the blue screen of death
For driver reasons, the default disk controller in VMware guests is an emulated LSI card. However, once you install VMware Tools in Windows (and immediately after installing the OS in most modern Linux distributions), it’s possible to slightly lower the overhead for disk operations by switching to the paravirtual SCSI controller (“pvscsi”). I’m all for lower… Continue reading The paravirtual SCSI controller and the blue screen of death