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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…

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update installation failed, vCenter Server is non-operational
Problem: update installation failed, vCenter Server is non-operational

I recently ran in to this error upgrading my homelab vCenter from 7.0.0.10400 to 7.0.10600:

vCenter: update installation failed, vCenter Server is non-operational

Luckily, the fix was easy – all I needed to do was to delete the file “/etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf”

So you just need to SSH to your vCenter and execute this command: 

rm /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf
The fix: rm /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf

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A few days ago, I decided to update my vCenter server to version 6.7 U2c – normally this is an easy task with the update section in the VAMI interface. But this time I just encountered this error message when I tried to search for the update:

Error in method invocation ({‘default_message’: ‘Manifest verification failed’, ‘id’: ‘com.vmware.appliance.update.manifest_verification_failed’, ‘args’: []}, ‘Verification Failure\n’, ”)

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I’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!

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This morning I faced a strange issue in my vSphere Lab when a wanted to login to VAMI interface – of course to install the newly released “vSphere 6.7 U1” update.

I opened the VAMI URL for my Platform service controller (PSC): https://<FQDN>:5480 and typed in my root credentials as a normally would. However, the only thing that showed on the screen was a message saying: “Unable to login”.

After this I tried to type in my password multiple times to make sure that I was actually typing in the correct one, but still, I just got the same error message.

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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!

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