You are properly not going to use it anyway (after you have installed VMware Tools).
The big “WHY”? – because if you remove it – then you don’t have to worry about current and future vulnerabilities on the virtual USB controller (there have been a few).
Take a look at my colleague blogpost (To get some more details 🙂 ): VMware VMs and USB Controller – Virtual Allan (virtual-allan.com)
You are not very likely to bump into Windows 2003 physical servers anymore – but nevertheless that just happened to me a week ago. The task was clear – this server needs to be virtualized into a vSphere 7 environment, running vSAN.
The problem with this task is that to convert (P2V) a 2003 server you need to install vCenter Converter 6.2 on it, since the latest release 6.3 simply doesn’t work on 2003 servers (It won’t install).
Next problem is that vCenter Converter 6.2 doesn’t work with vSAN 7 – only “traditional storage” can be used as target – but in this case there were no other storage than vSAN that could be used as target.
What to do? – read on…
If you run in to the above error when installing Windows 11 as a virtual machine on ESXi (or other virtual platforms) then be aware that there is a workaround.
Continue reading
I recently ran into the above problem with a customer while trying to upgrade ESXi from Prism interface. The KB6470 Mentioned that it might be related to the ESXi scratch partition not having enough available space. But that wasn’t the issue here.
Continue readingAfter I have upgraded my home lab from ESXi 7.0 to 7.0 update 1c (17325551) I ran into an issue updating VMware Tools on my VMs.
I tried both update options (“automatically” and “manually”), but both failed with a VIX error.
Automatilly update output = “vix error code = 21004”
Manually update = “vix error code = 21009”
I have lately been involved in two vSAN installation that had this alert in vSAN Health pane.
Another side effect is that the hosts on the warning list is unable to enter maintenance mode.
Continue readingI’ve just seen this in the release notes for VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 Update 1b:
Removing a virtual machine folder from the inventory by using the vSphere Client might delete all virtual machines
In the vSphere Client, if you right-click on a folder and select Remove from Inventory from the drop-down menu, the action might delete all virtual machines in that folder from the disk and underlying datastore, and cause data loss.This issue is resolved in this release.
I’ve just checked this in my lab on the 6.7 U1b release – when I delete a VMfolder with a VM inside – the VM gets removed from inventory but not deleted on the datastore!
If I delete a VMfolder containing a VM, in vCenter 6.5 the VM gets deleted in the datastore!
Be careful when deleting virtual machine folders!
For quite some time I have observed a LOM warning in VMware health status tab on an HPE Proliant ML350 Gen10 server. It seems like it reports the warning on two NIC that are down, even though there are unused by ESXi.
A couple of days ago I was visiting a customer to setup their Lenovo host to run vSAN – after the initial setup of vSAN kernel IPs, disk groups and so on, I took a look at the “VSAN Health check” to make sure that everything was healthy and supported.
Under the “hardware compatibility” part all checkmarks where green, but the Controller firmware version was not detected – so I did found it a bit strange that it reports the disk controller as supported without knowing what version it actually was running.
This issue is not new to me, as I have seen it a couple of times before, but this time it was different after all.
This blog post is not about the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF -> VMware KB56931) but about the HTAware Mitigation tool version 1.0.0.9 (HTAwareMitigation-1.0.0.9.zip) that seems to have issues when used on single hosts (instead of clusters) – here is the problem that I have observed.
You run the command:
Set-HTAwareMitigationConfig -VMhostName <hostname> -Enable
Followed by
Get-HTAwareMitigationConfig -VMhostName <hostname>
Get-HTAwareMitigationConfig not working on single host
As you might see the “Set-HTAwareMitigationConfig -VMhostname <hostname>” command doesn’t seem to do anything!