stephenmbell's Posts

Thanks Scott. I think this did the trick.  I moved my VM's, Datastores, Networks into folders.  Assigned the proper permissions (1 cumulative role) to the folders. My question now is - how ... See more...
Thanks Scott. I think this did the trick.  I moved my VM's, Datastores, Networks into folders.  Assigned the proper permissions (1 cumulative role) to the folders. My question now is - how do I have "Create VM" permission on the Host level assigned to the data center - prevent allowing vms to be created at the / level (e.g. not in a folder). Thanks Steve
Hello all, I've been trying to wrap my head around this for some time now and I just can't figure out how to make it work the way I would like.  I am being asked to set up the proper permissio... See more...
Hello all, I've been trying to wrap my head around this for some time now and I just can't figure out how to make it work the way I would like.  I am being asked to set up the proper permissions to allow our software developers to create/modify/delete virtual machines within our production esxi cluster.  I have this part configured.  The part I am struggling with is restricting this access to a certain area (within a folder or  resource pool etc) - not the entire cluster or datacenter. I have a custom role set up that has what appears to be the proper permissions - but I feel like I can't get this correct because of where the permissions need to be applied.  Datastore: Allocate space, Browse datastore, Update virtual machine files, Update virtual machine metadata, Host: Local operations > Create virtual machine, Delete virtual machine, Reconfigure virtual machine Network: Assign network Resource: Assign virtual machine to resource pool, Migrate powered off virtual machine, Migrate powered on virtual machine Virtual Machine: Change Configuration (All) Virtual Machine: Edit Inventory > Create new, Remove, Unregister Virtual Machine: Interaction Virtual Machine: Provisioning > Modify customization specification, Read customization specification Virtual Machine: Snapshot Management (All) I am feeling like I need to move the datastores that they are authorized to use into a folder, and set a specific permission on that folder for a datastore role.  Same for networks.  Once I hit the host level I start to question my thoughts.  If I grant Create Virtual Machine permission at the Host level (or Cluster, or DataCenter) this would allow creating a vm across the entire ESXi cluster, correct? In addition to that - I feel like having to create specific roles / permissions for the datastore layer, network layer, resource layer, vm layer, and host layer seems like a lot of complexity for what I am trying to accomplish.  Again, if I set the above permissions at the Datacenter level and propagate to children, this role is able to perform all of the functions needed for their job.  However, they also have permission to do more than needed.  How do I go about restricting this? Thanks Steve
Hey everyone, Looking for a little clarity here.  Running ESXi 6.7.  My environment has 3 hosts, 1 data center, 1 cluster.  I am looking to delegate permissions to a specific group of peop... See more...
Hey everyone, Looking for a little clarity here.  Running ESXi 6.7.  My environment has 3 hosts, 1 data center, 1 cluster.  I am looking to delegate permissions to a specific group of people to be able to create virtual machines.  My current thought is that I would create a folder where all of these VMs should live, and assign the permissions at this level.  I went ahead and did this and I am having problems assigning virtual machine to resource pool, allocating space on a datastore, etc.. Looks like I am getting these problems because the permissions I have set are on the folder inside the cluster inside the datacenter. The folder doesn't have any "resource pools" in it, or any datastores in it. I feel like I could do this by assigning certain rights at the cluster level -- allocating space and assigning a vm to a resource pool.  Then allowing create vm on the folder.  That seems like a lot of granularity for this which makes me wonder if I am thinking about this correctly. Ideally I want to give our dev group ability to create/modify/delete vms in a specific area - with the idea that they can't modify ALL VMs, only the ones that apply to them. How would you accomplish this? Thanks Steve
Thanks for all of the input - I was finally back in the office today and able to verify. Reinstalling after an install of Firefox seemed to resolve my issue. Thanks again sb
Thanks for the reply. Just checked - the .exe is located in Program Files (x86). -Steve
Thank you for the reply.  I first re-installed the VMRC from the vcenter web client.  This didn't do the trick, so then, I uninstalled Firefox, uninstalled PowerCLI, rebooted, installed Firefox, ... See more...
Thank you for the reply.  I first re-installed the VMRC from the vcenter web client.  This didn't do the trick, so then, I uninstalled Firefox, uninstalled PowerCLI, rebooted, installed Firefox, installed PowerCLI -- still seeing the same thing.  I installed Firefox 48.0.2. and VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 Release 1 build 3737840 I am running vcenter 6.0.0 3634793 with esxi 6.0.0 4192238 I feel like I shouldn't be struggling with this as much as I am.  I have to be missing something?!?! Any guidance is appreciated. sb
Hello Community - I am hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.  I had to rebuild my laptop recently and I haven't been able to figure this out.  Prior to the crash - I was ab... See more...
Hello Community - I am hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.  I had to rebuild my laptop recently and I haven't been able to figure this out.  Prior to the crash - I was able to run get-vm myVirtualMachine | open-vmconsolewindow    and this would open up in my browser. A while back I had an issue when Chrome stopped supporting NPAPI - so I had to use Set-PowerCLIConfiguration to set my VMConsoleWindowBrowser to be Firefox.  Once set - this worked fine for months. Now that I had to reinstall everything I can't seem to get past (in Firefox) - I run the command and I see a "tap here to activate the plugin".  Once I do, I click Allow and Remember - and my browser just stops at a white screen Any help or direction with this issue would be greatly appreciated as I would prefer to stay out of the web client or windows client as much as possible. Thanks, sb
So I gave it a shot.  It did not work.  It gave me a mismatch sparse bundle error.... Sidenote: After going through and re-configuring one of the new hosts, it wasn't as bad as I had rememb... See more...
So I gave it a shot.  It did not work.  It gave me a mismatch sparse bundle error.... Sidenote: After going through and re-configuring one of the new hosts, it wasn't as bad as I had remembered.  And for the second host, I wrote a powercli to do all of the networking, so that helped a great deal. sb
Unfortunatley, no.  We have Enterprise licensing.  Not enterprise plus.  I will give it a shot and post back the results.
Thank you for the response.  I read that kb over before my initial post. So I am aware it is possible to backup and restore configuration with PowerCLI.  I guess my question is - for what I am lo... See more...
Thank you for the response.  I read that kb over before my initial post. So I am aware it is possible to backup and restore configuration with PowerCLI.  I guess my question is - for what I am looking to accomplish, is this a good idea?  Or should I just go through and manually configure the whole thing? Thanks again!
This is my first post, as I am just starting to get into PowerCLI - though I do have a fair amount of Powershell experience. We recently purchased 2 new hosts that are intended to replace 2 ex... See more...
This is my first post, as I am just starting to get into PowerCLI - though I do have a fair amount of Powershell experience. We recently purchased 2 new hosts that are intended to replace 2 existing hosts.  The process seems rather straight forward: 1.  Migrate all VMs off of Host A 2.  Power down Host A, unrack. 3.  Rack New Host A, install ESXi, configure ESXi 4.  Migrate VMs back to Host A. Repeat for Host B. My question is - I have backed up my ESXi configuration files using PowerCLI.  Is it possible (and advisable) to restore these same configuration files to the new host, assuming it comes up on the same version of ESXi?  This would save me having to configure all of the NICs and hostnames and NTP, etc etc? I see there is a Set-VMHostFirmware that I can pull in a backup configuration that I got from the original Host?  What if the hardware is different?   I am pulling out Dell R715 servers and putting in Dell R630. Thanks in advance, sb
Hopefully this is a straight forward question.  Next week we are doing a big network switch replacement / and some re-working of some of our networking.  Part of this project, we are changing the... See more...
Hopefully this is a straight forward question.  Next week we are doing a big network switch replacement / and some re-working of some of our networking.  Part of this project, we are changing the IP address scheme of our iSCSI network (with vmware and our san).  Currently, our environment is 2 ESXi 5.1 hosts, a vcenter server, and 1 san.  I just have a few questions so I  don't hose everything up.  Because we are moving our iSCSI switches, everything has to come down. With that being said - I am thinking this should be my process: 1.  Power down all virtual machines 2.  Unmount our datastores (all external san storage) 3.  Disconnect Storage Adapter 4.  Change IP addresses of san 5.  Change IP addresses of vSwitches to correlate to the new iSCSI network 6.  Reconnect storage adapter 7.  Remount datastores 3 questions. 1.  Is the above process valid? 2.  Will I have to setup all of the VMKernel Port Bindings again? 3.  I have my configured scratch location set up to be on our shared storage for each of these hosts because they have no internal disk.  When I unmount the datastores, will this cause an issue? Thanks in advance. SB
For my development environment, I have 2 servers running ESXi 5.1.  I have multiple datastores configured,  1 of which is a Synology RS812RP+.  NAS device.  I have some iSCSI targets set up on th... See more...
For my development environment, I have 2 servers running ESXi 5.1.  I have multiple datastores configured,  1 of which is a Synology RS812RP+.  NAS device.  I have some iSCSI targets set up on this device, 2TB each.  This device has 2 NICs, both of which are plugged into our Dell Force10 switches (used only for iSCSI traffic).  The MTU on the NAS is set to 9000.    I go thorugh my ESXi and attach to the storage, create the datastores.  I can browse them, run virtual machines from them - everything seems to function fine. After the datastores are connected for a while (last night it proved to be about 45 minutes) - I start getting alarm emails from vCenter -  saying that the redundancy paths to my storage device (the synology) have been degraded. Path is down. I also have a Equallogic SAN PS5000 and PS4100 connected to this environment. I am only getting these email alarms when the synology is connected. Has anyone else seen this?  What would cause this?  Thanks in advance sb
The other day I upgraded my esxi 4.1 host to 5.1.  My process was as follows: 1.  Our environment on this particular server was local storage.  I connected some external storage via iSCSI, mov... See more...
The other day I upgraded my esxi 4.1 host to 5.1.  My process was as follows: 1.  Our environment on this particular server was local storage.  I connected some external storage via iSCSI, moved all of the guests to the external storage.  2.  Installed 5.1 to the build in SD card 3.  Added my guest machines (on external storage) to the host 4.  Upgraded vmware tools 5.  Upgraded virtual hardware. -- So today, I figured I would move these back to the local storage - but I noticed that the local storage was still vmfs3.  So I upgraded it.  Then I noticed that all of the vms that were local (and are now external) still exist on the local - so I removed the datastore and tried to re-add it.  I got the following error: "Call "HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "dmzesxi01" failed." After doing some research, I found a post about the partedUtility.  When I tried to mklabel I am getting that the disk is read-only. How can I re-attach this local datastore and move my vms back to it? Thanks in advance, sb
Hello all, Do any of you use a synology device for vmware? I have a production virtual environment set up now with some dell equallogic sans and some r720 servers. In addition, I have ... See more...
Hello all, Do any of you use a synology device for vmware? I have a production virtual environment set up now with some dell equallogic sans and some r720 servers. In addition, I have a development environment for our software development team - this consists of 2 dell poweredge 6950 (6-7 year old servers), 1TB of internal storage each, and they are connected to a 1TB lun on an equallogic san. This configuration is running fine for them, however, they are getting to a point where they require some more disk space. Rather than go out and get a $15k san for them (that will never fly here) - I was wondering if, because it is development, we could get them a synology device with a few TB of disk in it, and use it either as an iSCSI or NFS target for their vmware development environment. Of course, I need this disk to perform at reasonable levels. It doesn't need to light up the charts, but if it is going to be so slow to the point where my coders won't use it, it won't solve my problem. Anyone have any suggestions or previous experience? thanks sb
The existing infrastructure we have in place now is simply internal storage - so there is no vCenter server.  The new hardware that we are purchasing will be 2 esxi hosts and an equalogic san.  O... See more...
The existing infrastructure we have in place now is simply internal storage - so there is no vCenter server.  The new hardware that we are purchasing will be 2 esxi hosts and an equalogic san.  Once we get to shared storage we will also have a vCenter server in place. 
Hello all - I just wanted to throw this out there to get an idea on how to accomplish what we are trying to do.  We are currently running ESX 3.01 in our environment.  We are currently planni... See more...
Hello all - I just wanted to throw this out there to get an idea on how to accomplish what we are trying to do.  We are currently running ESX 3.01 in our environment.  We are currently planning on upgrading to ESXi 5.1 and as a part of this upgrade, we will be purchasing new hardware.  My question is - once I get the new hardware in place and installed, when I power down my existing ESX 3.x vm's and copy them to my new hardware - what will I need to to make this work?  I know that the virtual hardware version needs to be upgraded (somehow??) and also the vmware tools need to be upgraded - for each of the machines.  Other than that, any tips, pointers or info that you can share would be greatly appreciated. Thanks sb
Thank you both for the response.  Sure enough, the delta files were gone, the vmx file was pointing to the proper vmdk and the log file looked like the snap shots had been committed.  I power... See more...
Thank you both for the response.  Sure enough, the delta files were gone, the vmx file was pointing to the proper vmdk and the log file looked like the snap shots had been committed.  I powered the machine on and it came right up.  Now I've got 2 more machines to do this with Thanks again! sb
We have a server that is still running ESX 3.01, we are preparing to replace the hardware and upgrade everything.  Through this preparation process I came across a VM that has some old (2009), HU... See more...
We have a server that is still running ESX 3.01, we are preparing to replace the hardware and upgrade everything.  Through this preparation process I came across a VM that has some old (2009), HUGE snapshots that need to be commited.  Because of problems I have experienced removing snapshots through the console in the past, I decided to run this from the command line.  I ran the vmware-cmd command to remove the snapshots, connected to a secondary ssh session to watch the delta files.  I am at a point now where all of the delta files are gone from the directory but the snapshots are still listed in the vmsd file.  In addition, the vmware-cmd session has not yet returned to a prompt (either it is hung or still doing something?!?!) It has been running (or hung) for about 24 hours now.  I was about to kill this process and try to start up the VM - but I decided to post here first.  Has anyone else experienced this? Thanks, sb
Hopefully someone can help me out here and point me in the right direction - I am sort of new to VMWare here. I have a Windows XP guest that the hard drive had filled so I wanted to expand the... See more...
Hopefully someone can help me out here and point me in the right direction - I am sort of new to VMWare here. I have a Windows XP guest that the hard drive had filled so I wanted to expand the disk size a little for some breathing room. I used the post here - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007266 to accomplish this goal.  I have done this a few other times as well - and it has always worked well. This particular instance, I expanded the drive from to 60 GB using the interface.  Connected the drive to a windows 2008 r2 server, extended the partition, removed the added drive. Tried to boot the Windows XP machine and all I get now is a blinking cursor in top left of the console window. Of course - I don't have a back up.  I did verify that I can still see all of the data on the drive - for some reason, it just wont boot?!? Any suggestions out there? Thanks in advance. sb