Varrow Blogs

Lately I’ve been working on several implementations of the Cisco Nexus 1000v.  While doing so we’ve hit a couple of annoying bugs.  The first one was in a pretty simple environment.  The customer had a number of vSphere hosts with six NICs connected to a single uplink used for VM traffic.  The six NICs were [...]

If you try to connect to a VM’s console from the VI Client and receive something similar to: Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to server esx4.mydomain.com:903 Almost every time you see this it’s DNS. So check that first. Refer to this KB article too. For me, I knew it wasn’t DNS [...]

Just a little tip in case someone else hits this.  If you have an ESX host that can’t scan for updates or gets the following error in vCenter check the DNS config:
Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store.  Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details.
This [...]

Its no coincidence that the name of this post follows this doc, here.
Go ahead open it up, its worth a read. If your considering replicating your virtual environment then you best get up to speed. I know you have many questions, you always do..so what scenarios does this cover? Well here are few…

Replicating a [...]

More videos!  In this video I walk through converting a physical server running Windows in to a virtual server on VMware ESX.  This uses the built-in P2V conversion tool in Virtual Center.  The video is available here:

YouTube (Part 1)
YouTube (Part 2)
Screencast (Higher resolution)

Be sure to check out our other videos on the Varrow YouTube channel.
[...]

If you receive the error “Failed to Open File” when trying to perform a  P2V with the VMware Converter tool check your DNS.  It’s not actually a file or permissions problem but a DNS resolution issue.  When Virtual Center passes the information to the Converter Agent on the host being migrated it sends the host [...]

I’m all over the place this week.  Tonight I’m at a cool little coffee shop in Providence, RI enjoying an excellent latte and some gingerbread while trying to ignore the woman on the other side of the room with the really annoying laugh.  Yesterday Joe put up another great post about VMware and NFS.  Articles [...]