Category: vmware

Posted on opensource

VMware: How to extract Temperature information from ESXi for ARM, send it to InfluxDB, and display it with Grafana

Greetings friends, I told you a few weeks ago what VMware had just launched, and that it was going to revolutionize the world of virtualization and make it, even more, accessible in many new use cases with the new ESXi for ARM.Well, one of the things that worried me the most, I think I mentioned it in the video, was being able to control the temperature of the Raspberry Pi with ESXi for ARM, as ESXi usually gets all this data from the IPMI, iDRAC, iLO, etc.But luckily we have a hero (Tom Hebel) who works in VMware and who has compiled a native driver to extract this information, besides being able to interact with many more things.

Diagram of how this solution works

It's fine, I think, just creating a .json that telegraf then parses and writes to InfluxDB, but if I find a better way to do it, everything will get better, here the diagram:
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Posted on opensource

VMware: How to achieve a perfect metric collection interval with Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana

Greetings friends, I have told you in the past how to monitor your VMware environment using InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana, and according to Grafana's dashboard, you are using it with about 4300 people in your Datacenters. All this is great, and I thank you very much for all the support and that so many people have the solution deployed.Now, I have read for a long time that in some cases you were having incidents when monitoring the datastores in a correct way, which generated that the Dashboard will not display correctly, creating a lot of frustration, but this entry will ensure you have everything configured correctly.

vSphere vCenter - real-time metrics

VMware collects information every 20 seconds from the ESXi and stores this information in vCenter RAM. This makes it really easy and fast to access this information by telegraph or any other information collector. All this information is stored only for one hour in the vCenter, in the diagram we would be number 3, accessing directly to the Performance Manager:
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Posted on vmware

VMware: How to solve the error with Telegraf and vSphere “Task Name: Remote View Manager, Status: The request refers to an unexpected or unknown type”

Greetings everyone, if you have followed this blog for quite some time, I am sure you have stopped by the blog entry about How to Monitor a vSphere Environment using Grafana, InfluxDB and telegraf. That blog post has tons of comments, and feedback from all of you around the Globe, which is great. Lately I've started receiving some comments about a common error that some of you have seen once deployed the solution, the error should say something like this:
Task Name: Remote View Manager, Status: The request refers to an unexpected or unknown type
And it will look this on the vSphere Client, thanks to Stuart Kennedy for the screenshot:This is due to an old telegraf version you might be using, and the solution it is quite simple, upgrade to the latest telegraf version.
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Posted on vmware

VMware: Attend for free to the first North East VMUG of 2019 – Thursday 7th February

Greetings friends, 2019 it is here, and not only that, all the Community events start now to kicking off another season which will be much better than previous years in terms of content and of course new products and integrations.The best option to be on top of all the information out there, presented and delivered by great speakers whom are subject matter experts is to attend to your local VMUG, yo can find your local VMUG and when it will be at https://community.vmug.com/home

North East VMUG Thursday 7th February 2019

I was lucky enough to be selected as an speaker for the upcoming North East VMUG, which will take place on Thursday 7th February, among an impressive list of speakers, if you are around the area I will encourage you to attend, learn something new this day, and have the chance to speak with great professionals, not just the speakers but of course the rest of the attendees, which it is really the best of this VMUG the chance that we have to meet new peers, share some designs around our Datacenter, gather feedback and opinions and learn something new.Keep reading to know more about all the sessions, speakers and location for the North East VMUG happening on 7th February 2019

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Posted on vmware

VMware: How to configure VCSA 6.7 HA in vSphere Client HTML5, the New High Availability of vCenter Server Appliance

Greetings friends, I told you exactly a year ago about the new HA that VMware had included in vSphere 6.5 for vCenter, you can browse the article here if you continue in vSphere 6.5.Today I bring you the updated article for vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and later, since now everything is done from the HTML 5 Client, aka vSphere Client.

What is vCenter HA, and why is it important?

The HA for our vCenter Appliance was announced a year ago. This new HA allows us to add extra protection to our most critical element in any VMware Infrastructure, the vCenter. For years we have had to use HA on SQL Server, and manage to give a HA to services on Windows, but it has never been fully supported by VMware, and they have always recommended using its basic HA function, which is nothing more than lifting the VM on another Host.But since VMware vSphere 6.5, VMware already brings native HA for vCenter, only for the Linux appliance, not supported for Windows since this implementation is already in End-of-Life, besides configuring it is a job that will take just a few minutes, and suitable for any level of Admin VMware.
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Posted on vmware

VMworld: How to Download all VMworld 2018 Europe Breakout sessions in.mp4 format

Greetings friends, VMworld 2018 in its version of Europe has already finished, and although I still write about the announcements and news announced or presented, today I bring you how to download all Breakout sessions of this VMworld 2018 Europe as I told you how to do it for the sessions of VMworld 2018 US.

GitHub project with all sessions

As every year, William Lam leaves us the GitHub repository with the necessary links to be able to undertake our objective. However, this year is different, because he added the links to the stream and to the .mp4 as well.One of the things I enjoy the most during the year is to be able to use the sessions when I go by subway, or if I have to fly somewhere, so I leave you the GitHub repository I have created and William's backup (since if you use William's you don't download the session names), with the sessions and their links to the.mp4 directly:

OPTION 1 - Using Firefox quantum and Download Star to download all sessions

If we use Firefox Quantum, we can use the extension called Download Star, which you can find here: We'll go to the GitHub project, click on the extension and select the following - Video - and click on the link icon at the bottom left, the videos to download will appear in green:
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Posted on linux

Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana – Part XII (Native Telegraf Plugin for vSphere)

Greetings friends, today I bring you another one of those hidden gems that you like so much. In addition to being free and being able to display it in a few minutes, it has a potential that many commercial tools would like.Today we are about to create four fresh Grafana Dashboards within minutes, at the end of the blog, we can have some Dashboards (in plural friends) similar to these:vSphere Overview Dashboard
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Posted on vmware

VMworld: How to Download all VMworld 2018 US Breakout sessions in.mp4 format

Greetings friends, VMworld 2018 in its American version is over, and although I'm still writing about the announcements and news announced or presented, today I bring you how to download all the Breakout sessions of this VMworld 2018.

GitHub project with all sessions

As every year, William Lam leaves us the GitHub repository with the necessary links to be able to undertake our objective. However, this year is different, because he added the links to the stream and to the .mp4 as well.One of the things I enjoy the most during the year is to be able to use the sessions when I go by subway, or if I have to fly somewhere, so I leave you the GitHub repository I have created and William's backup (since if you use William's you don't download the session names), with the sessions and their links to the.mp4 directly:

OPTION 1 - Using Firefox quantum and Download Star to download all sessions

If we use Firefox Quantum, we can use the extension called Download Star, which you can find here: We'll go to the GitHub project, click on the extension and select the following - Video - and click on the link icon at the bottom left, the videos to download will appear in green:We will select the sessions we want and click on the icon located at the top right where it indicates the number of downloads.

OPTION 2 - Using WaterFox and DownThemAll! to download all the sessions

The extension called DownThemAll! is one of the best Firefox extension that Firefox has had for years, unfortunately and since Firefox upgraded to Quantum, this extension is not available for the latest Firefox Releases, and I have not found any alternative, so I used the browser, which is a Firefox fork, WaterFox, which supports this plugin, we will download WaterFox from here: And the DownThemAll! extension once we have installed WaterFox from here:
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Posted on vmware

VMware: How to solve [InstallationError] There was an error checking file system on altbootbank

Greetings friends, making several upgrades the other day I found the next error that breaks you in the morning if you are in a hurry and you are performing upgrades of ESXi, the error in question happened to me when I tried to update using an ESXi bundle:
[InstallationError]
 There was an error checking file system on altbootbank, please see log for detail.
 Please refer to the log file for more details.

Steps to troubleshoot the error easily

Fortunately the problem is solved in just a few seconds, the first thing we will have to do is check that the partition is OK and see the information of it:
vmkfstools -P /altbootbank/
This will return something similar to the following, be very attentive to the Partitions spanned part, as we will use this information later:
vfat-0.04 (Raw Major Version: 0) file system spanning 1 partitions.
File system label (if any): 
Mode: private
Capacity 261853184 (63929 file blocks * 4096), 87220224 (21294 blocks) avail, max supported file size 0
UUID: 2afcf7ef-53839aff-43f1-432714380654
Partitions spanned (on "disks"):
        naa.200049454505080f:5
Is Native Snapshot Capable: NO
The next command will be launched against the partition that has shown us the vmkfstools command:
dosfsck -a -w /dev/disks/naa.200049454505080f:5
Which will show us something like the next:
dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
/dev/disks/naa.200049454505080f:5: 212 files, 42635/63929 clusters
If we try to launch the ESXi update command again using the bundle, we won't have any more problems. I hope it serves you well.
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Posted on vmware

VMware: How to deploy VMware VCSA 6.5.x on VMware Fusion 10

Greetings friends, on certain occasions it is highly recommended to deploy an instance of VCSA 6.5 in our lab outside of our Homelab, using tools such as VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, so that we have our own VCSA VM on our computer, and we can play with it, apply patches, test new features, or even bring an entire nested environment.Congratulations, since VMware Fusion 10 and VMware Workstation 12, we natively support the deployment of VCSA 6.5 on these tools (without having to edit complicated files, or use Converter), let's go with the Blog.

Critical, vital, indispensable step - DNS, DNS and DNS

I have read in several articles, and lived in my own meats Castellanas, the failure to deploy VCSA 6.5. x in VMware Fusion without this step, it is indispensable to have a valid DNS entry for this new VM, and to have the PTR record also for the installation to be completed correctly:

Deploying VCSA 6.5. x on VMware Fusion 10 - in video

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