VSphere

In this blog post I will go over the steps I took in order to to be able to query my vCenter components from SaltStack using the SDDC SaltStack Modules. The SDDC SaltStack Modules were introduced in 2011. You can find the technical release blog here. The modules can be found on GitHub here. There is also a getting quick start guide that can be found here. Installing the SaltStack VMware Modules I am using the pre packaged ova for deployment which includes most of the components however it does have some outdated packages. The first step for was to upgrade pip: ...

This historical lab procedure updated an ESXi 7.0 host to ESXi 7.0 Update 3f, build 20036589, using esxcli. The target profile and release notes are for 7.0 U3f, not 7.0 U1. More details about that release are available in the ESXi 7.0 U3f release notes. Broadcom’s build-number table records later ESXi 7 releases through Update 3w, build 24784741. Broadcom also states that vSphere 7 reached End of General Support on October 2, 2025. Use this page only as a record of the pinned lab change, not as a current release recommendation. ...

During one of the upgrades in my VCF lab, I accidentally installed an ESXi 7.x build outside that VCF release’s validated design. This historical example records the lab recovery I tried. It is not a general production downgrade procedure. Warning: For a VCF-managed host or a production downgrade, stop and engage Broadcom Support. Downgrading can remove or replace drivers and components, can be incompatible with the current vCenter/NSX/firmware combination, and might leave the host unable to boot or rejoin its cluster. Use a supported rollback, reinstall or restore procedure when directed. ...

I was recently going through a vCenter upgrade and got stuck at an error Exception occurred in postinstallHook. I tried reverting from snapshot and trying again but I ran through the same issue. The issue in my case was that the catalina.properties had the wrong permissions. The fix was to change the permissions to perfcharts:cis and then resuming the update in the VAMI interface. The catalina.properties is located /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties. The command to fix it is ...

I recently upgraded my vCenter to 7.0.3 18700403 and I noticed that when I went to Lifecycle Manager I was welcomed with this error. “Authentication failed, Lifecycle Manager server could not be contacted.” Im not aware of a fix for this issue however using the administrator@vsphere.local seems to be working.

I have the need to completely shut down some of my vSAN clusters for various clusters and ive been having a hard time finding the proper procedure. As of 2/16/2021 VMware released guidance here Here are the steps I took to do it on my end. If you have the vCLS service enabled follow my other instructions here prior to starting the rest of this guide. Disable cluster member updates from vCenter on each ESXi host in the cluster by running ...

While I was trying to perform an upgrade to my ESXi installation I ran in to the below error: The fix was pretty simple. The hypervisor doesn’t have enough space to download and install the package so we need to enable one of the available datastores for the function. For vCenter go to the host in question to Configure -> System -> System Swap ...

With the release of vCenter 7 Update 1, VMware introuced the vCLS (vSphere Clustering Service). More information can be found here. The Insufficient Resources Error Looking at the error details it looks like it is looking for a feature called cpuid.mwait Root Cause: EVC on the vCLS VMs Reviewing the VMX file it seems like EVC is enabled on the vCLS VMs. I didn’t want to enable EVC on the whole cluster so I wanted to do it only on the specific VMs. ...

I recently ran in to an issue where I had to re-register my NSX server with vIDM. The ask was to extract the Thumbprint from vIDM. The command I ran to extract it was: echo -n | openssl s_client -connect hostname:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha256 This can be used across multiple products where the Thumbprint needs to be extracted

I’ve ran recently in to an issue where I couldn’t perform an update from the admin UI, in order to get up and running I executed the following from a ssh shell. I was luky enough to find the documentation here /usr/lib/applmgmt/support/scripts/software-packages.py install --url Some of the additional options that could be used software-packages stage --url software-packages install --staged I like to perform the update from the command line because it gives me additional information that I might not be able to see in the UI ...