After a power outage, we powered on our VMware infrastructure, and as we went through the process, we quickly realized that vCenter was not coming back online. vCenter was not reachable via icmp or http/https. Logging into the ESXi console showed the VCSA booting very slowly, but eventually it booted up. Still no network connectivity. After enabling bash and
Backup VMware Virtual Machines
If you need a free, open-source alternative for backing up your virtual machines, look no further than XSI Backup. Before I did an upgrade to some VM's I wanted to completely back them up (not just a snapshot), so I downloaded XSI Backup here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xsibackup/
Once downloaded, copy it to the /opt folder on your ESXi
Windows Server 2008R2/2012 Time Sync
I published a blog post last year regarding verifying NTP settings on a Windows Server. Now, I recently needed to go a step farther and force a server to time sync with a DC. Here are the relevant commands:
To find out what server is the time server on your domain, from the CMD prompt run:
nltest /dsgetdc:your_domain_Synchronizing ESXi time with a Microsoft Domain Controller
Steps to synchronize your ESXi host time with a Microsoft DC here:
VMware Insufficient video RAM
Looking through my ESXi event log I saw this message:
"Warning message on server: Insufficient video RAM. The maximum resolution of the virtual machine will be limited to 1672x1254. To use the configured maximum resolution of 2560x1600, increase the amount of video RAM allocated to this virtual machine by setting svgavramSize="16384000" in the virtual machine's configuration file."
This is