Homelabs…It’s a topic that gets a lot of interest everywhere. We’re all geeks at heart who like to tinker with hardware and play around and break things. I haven’t had a homelab since I sold my Supermicro server back in 2016. Back then, I had access to a lab at my employer and felt that I could no longer justify the cost of running that thing in my basement. Fast forward to 2020 and I find myself really missing that lab....

The last few weeks I’ve had to do a couple of IP changes on ESXi hosts. This always goes without a lot of issues but it can be annoying when you have to wait for the new IP address to be updated in DNS and then for it to be visible in vCenter. The quickest way to get the new DNS records, is to clear the DNS cache in VCSA. Since VCSA is based on PhotonOS, this will also work on other PhotonOS VMs....

Today, while I was updating vCenter in my lab, I ran into a strange issue. The update I was installing failed, when I wanted to try again, this ominous error message popped up. vCenter being non-operational left me a bit of a doom and gloom feeling but, thankfully, the fix is rather easy. Fixing the issue Open up an SSH session to your vCenter server and run the command below to remove the software_update_state....

After postponing this exam for too long, I finally took the time to study for and take the VCAP-DCV deploy exam. To be honest, I was kind of looking forward to this exam. I love playing in the lab and getting my hands dirty in an environment. So to be able to take an actual lab exam was pretty exciting to me. In this post, I will try to give some pointers and tips that might help you pass the exam....

Everyone has done VCSA upgrades dozens of times, but every now and then you come across something that you haven’t seen before. Today, this was the case while I was doing an upgrade. When you get to the deployment size selection, in the first stage of the upgrade, I noticed I was unable to select anything smaller than “Medium” size. Changing the storage size also didn’t make the Tiny or small sizes available....

In the past few weeks, I’ve been in the process of updating several standalone ESXi hosts to 6.5. As you would expect, everything went smooth up to a certain point. Several hosts started failing and throwing this error: VIB LSI_bootbank_scsi-megaraid-perc9_6.901.55.00-1OEM.500.0.0.472560 requires vmkapi_2_0_0_0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile. VIB LSI_bootbank_scsi-mpt3sas_04.00.00.00.1vmw-1OEM.500.0.0.472560 requires com.vmware.driverAPI-9.2.0.0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile. The entire error is shown below....

The saying goes “time flies when you’re having fun” and boy was that true at VMworld! I had heard a lot of stories about VMworld and have been wanting to go for ages. Sadly, I never got the opportunity to actually go until this year! As always, I entered to win a blogger pass and this year it actually worked out 🙂 Thanks again to Corey Romero and the team for giving me this opportunity....

Everyone’s been here before, you know the iLO password should be set to something, only to find out that on just this one server the password is different. There are several ways to reset the iLO password; you could reboot the server and reset it that way. But who likes planning downtime on a server for a password reset? Luckily you find that the server is an ESXi host that was installed using the HPE customized image....

Next week, the 14th of June, it’s time for one of my favorite times of the year, the yearly VMUGBE is upon us! It’s an amazing day filled with great sessions, good conversations, all set in a lovely venue. The Belgian VMUG was the first VMUG I ever attended, 4 years ago already. It’s where I met a lot of people I know in the community and, on a personal level, where I learned to just go up to random people and start talking to them....

This year, I got the opportunity to go to VMware Empower 2019 in Lisbon. The ticket includes a free exam voucher so I used it to take my VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. I’m glad to say that I passed! The exam was a lot harder than I expected though. Having just done the VCP exams, I did not expect the VCAP to be that much harder. In this post, I will try to share some tips that I found useful during preparation and how I experienced the exam...