Always Upgrading Blog

If you’re running a NetApp & VMWare environment and are using SMVI for your backups, you’ll occasionally come across a stalled SMVI backup when looking in vCenter. You’ll also notice a bunch of SMVI snapshots (like those above) when looking in RVTools for old snapshots like the good little VMware administrator you are… :)

I came across the following error when trying to install the VMware PowerCLI tools today, which appears to be related to requiring TLS 1.2 now.

A common task for Linux/VMware administrators is adding a new virtual disk to a Linux VM and expanding the filesystem to utilise the free space. Below is a quick guide on how to complete this task.

As I’m in the process of wiping and reloading a bunch of 2008R2 domain controllers with Server 2019, I created a handy Powershell script to change the primary and secondary DNS server settings. This is useful to ensure the primary DNS server is not set to a server that will be offline. I discovered the hard way that when reloading a server with the same hostname and IP, that DNS will not gracefully utilise the secondary DNS server if the primary IP is responding but not answering DNS queries (as is the case before DNS is reinstalled when the 2019 server is promoted).

The script takes advantage of the VMware PowerCLI to retrieve Windows server names on a per VMware Cluster basis, these are then cycled through and the DNS settings updated for each.

As part of the seemingly never ending upgrade cycle, the last of the VMware ESXi 5.5 stragglers are being upgraded. If you’ve been through this before, you’ll probably already know that if you’ve previously upgraded a host from an older version of ESXi to 5.5 you will likely get an incompatible warning like the image above when you try to apply your Upgrade Baseline for ESXi 6.5.