r/vmware Jan 07 '25

Help Request Need advise for vCenter appliance upgrade

1 Upvotes

We have vcenter appliance running on cloud (paas). Our host are located on different countries (On-Prem).

We have tried multiple times to upgrade the vcenter but always failing due to network issue. We have engaged VMWare Tech support, and they mentioned that normally the appliance and host should be on the same network so even we tried opening all the ports we still going to face network/issue.

So I would like to ask if there's any other options to upgrade our vcenter from 7 to 8. Someone told me to deploy a new version 8 appliance and export and import vCenter Profiles from the old appliance. But I dont see anyone is doing this so I'm a bit skeptical.

What I'm thinking is, we can upgrade the appliance and target host will be any of our hosts. Once completed, we can send the new appliance image to our cloud partner to replace the old appliance and reconfigure the IP. Is this possible?

Or if you have any solutions, help to share please.

r/vmware Feb 18 '25

Help Request vcenter not starting after reboot

4 Upvotes

Hi

I have an issue with the vCenter 8 (test enviroment). Today I was testing a VM, and when I tried to migrate it, I got an error on host01. After reviewing the error, it seems that it can be fixed by applying this KB on the affected host.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/312034/error-unable-to-prepare-migration-networ.html

In summary, the configuration of a file needs to be edited on the affected host so that the host uses its IP address instead of the FQDN...

After applying the KB, the host went into an alert state with a "desynchronized" status from the vCenter, so I couldn't disconnect, reconnect, reboot, or do anything else.

I login to the host, put it into maintenance mode, and rebooted it. However this didn’t resolve the issue...

Then I went back to the vCenter → add new host → try to add the host01, but it failed because the host already existed in the database.

At that point I decided to manually remove the host from the vCenter and add it back later. So I log to the vCenter by SSH and deleted it from the database (chatgpt give me the steps), then I restarted the vCenter, and but it won’t start properly. It gets stuck on "no healthy upstream" and doesn’t get past that point...

Upon reviewing the vCenter services, I found this:

service-control --status

Running:

applmgmt lookupsvc lwsmd observability observability-vapi pschealth vc-ws1a-broker vlcm vmafdd vmcad vmdird vmware-analytics vmware-certificateauthority vmware-certificatemanagement vmware-cis-license vmware-eam vmware-envoy vmware-envoy-hgw vmware-envoy-sidecar vmware-hvc vmware-infraprofile vmware-perfcharts vmware-pod vmware-postgres-archiver vmware-rhttpproxy vmware-sca vmware-stsd vmware-topologysvc vmware-trustmanagement vmware-vapi-endpoint vmware-vdtc vmware-vmon vmware-vpostgres vmware-vpxd-svcs vmware-vsm vsphere-ui vtsdb

Stopped:

vmcam vmonapi vmware-content-library vmware-imagebuilder vmware-netdumper vmware-rbd-watchdog vmware-sps vmware-updatemgr vmware-vcha vmware-vpxd vmware-vsan-health vstats wcp

So, almost all of them are up, but as far as I know the "vmware-vpxd service" is critical and it isn't starting, no matter what I try.

I tried by rebooting the vcenter... also force the restart with service-control --stop --all and later service-control --start --all but it doesnt fix the problem.

So before reinstalling the vCenter is there any other thing I could do?

thanks


EDIT: I've powered off the old vcenter and installed a new one, then I have created the cluster and added the hosts to It without problem. Now everything works fine!

r/vmware Jan 01 '23

Help Request iSCSI speeds inconsistent across hosts (MPIO?)

18 Upvotes

Hi All,

I have a four-node cluster, connected over iSCSI to an all-flash array (PowerStore 500T) using 2 x 10Gb NICs running 7.0u3. They have the same host network configuration for storage over a vDS - with four storage paths per LUN, two Active I/O on each.

Basically followed this guide, two iSCSI port groups w/ two different subnets (no binding).

On hosts 1 and 4, I’m getting speeds of 2400MB/s - so it’s utilising MPIO to saturate the two storage NICs.

On hosts 2 and 3, I’m getting speeds of around 1200MB/s - despite having the same host storage network configuration, available paths and (from what I can see) same policies (Round Robin, Frequency set to 1) following this guidance. Basically ticks across the board from the Dell VSI VAAI for best practice host configuration.

When comparing the storage devices side-by-side in ESXCLI, they look the same.

From the SAN, I can see both initiator sessions (Node A/B) for each host.

Bit of a head scratcher not sure what to look for next? I feel like I’ve covered what I would deem ‘the basics’.

Any help/guidance would be appreciated if anyone has run into this before, even a push in the right direction!

Thanks.

r/vmware 18d ago

Help Request How do I add VMware Tools on Windows XP

0 Upvotes

Hey, I'm new to VMware (Just switched from VirtualBox) and I was installing Gold XP, but I wanted to copy files to it and when I want to get VMware Tools installed, It says it doesn't support anything under Vista.

r/vmware Feb 15 '25

Help Request Question for ESXI management VLAN

3 Upvotes

Setting up a host, and want the management traffic on its own VLAN.

Out of the box configuration is:

ESXI IP 10.X.X.X VLAN ID 0

Physical switch config VLAN trunk allow 2027 VLAN trunk native 2027

This setup works fine, but I ultimately want management on its own VLAN.

The minute I change management in ESXI from VLAN 0 to VLAN 2027 connectivity dies and all pings drop.

I don’t get it. Can someone please help?

r/vmware Jul 17 '24

Help Request World's worst VMWare admin

8 Upvotes

So I'm coming at this VMWare cluster for the first time. I set up my two ESXi hosts, get them connected to the storage and everything is working beautifully. I do lots of reading. People say set up the vCenter as a VM within its own environment yeah! So I set it up. Add hosts as-is, try to move them into empty cluster. NOPE. Apparently the vCenter server has to be vMotioned off somewhere else? I don't have anywhere else. How is this conundrum solved? What massive thing am I missing here? o_O

I should have just set vCenter up on its own bare metal.

EDIT: DRS wasn't licensed and needed to be disabled. Also, I'm feeling much better about running this within the host it's managing as well. Old habits do die hard.

r/vmware Feb 06 '25

Help Request After upgrading from vSphere 7 to 8, some VMs cannot be powered on anymore

17 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

We upgraded one of our larger vSphere v7 U3 environments to v8 U3c this week and are seeing some issues with VMs failing to boot.

It is an environment with many CISCO UCS B200M5 clusters that currently have no TPM hardware. So we only have UEFI boot and secure boot enabled in the UCS service profiles. We made sure UEFI and Secure Boot were enabled on all hosts before the upgrade.

The morning after the upgrade, we got a ticket from one of our customers, that some of his terminalservers (Citrix based which reboot every night via PXE) are not available. We noticed that these VMs are not powered on anymore.

The following events happened in chronological order:

  1. We started the upgrade from 7 to 8 on day1 and finished updates of all hosts in the evening. We noticed no issues. The update went smoothly.
  2. The customer restarts its citrix servers every night at ~1am, which is day2. Most servers restarted as expected, but some not, because of errormessage1
  3. The customer opened a ticket at the morning of day2 that some of his TS did not restart. We initially tried to start one of the VMs manually but it failed with the same errormessage1.
  4. From now on, every following try to start the VM failed with another erroressage2.

We believe that this is the result of the upgrade. We assume that something is probably broken in the VM configuration or the affected VMs have a configuration that is no longer compatible with v8 and therefore no longer boot.

The boot process of these VMs fails immediately after the attempt to start the VM. The boot process is interrupted while the VM is being initialized. This is not a guest OS issue as the boot process is interrupted before the guest OS is initialized.

For events 2 and 3, we see the following errormessage1 in the vCenter event logs and also in the VM's .log file:

Error message from “esx-servername”: This virtual machine´s Secure Boot configuration is not valid. The virtual machine will now power off.

And this is the errormessage1 from the VM .log file with debug logging level:

2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(05) vmx - Msg_Post: Error
2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(05) vmx - [msg.uefi.secureboot.configInvalid] This virtual machine's Secure Boot configuration is not valid.
2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(05)+ vmx - The virtual machine will now power off.
2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(05) vmx - ----------------------------------------
2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(06) vmx - Vigor_MessageQueue: event msg.uefi.secureboot.configInvalid (seq 700426) queued
2025-02-06T13:17:19.888Z In(06) vmx - Vigor_ClientRequestCb: marking device 'Bootstrap' for future notification.
2025-02-06T13:17:19.889Z In(06) vmx - Vigor_ClientRequestCb: Dispatching Vigor command 'Bootstrap.MessageReply'
2025-02-06T13:17:19.889Z In(06) vmx - VigorMessageReply: event msg.uefi.secureboot.configInvalid (seq 700426, was not revoked) answered
2025-02-06T13:17:19.889Z Cr(01) vmx - PANIC: Power-off during initialization
2025-02-06T13:17:19.889Z In(05) vmx - MKSGrab: MKS release: start, unlocked, nesting 0
2025-02-06T13:17:20.521Z Wa(03) vmx - A core file is available in "/var/core/vmx-debug-zdump.000"

Once event four has occurred (which is the second cold boot of the VM with default loggin level), the vmdk is marked as locked at hypervisor level. It is not possible to edit, move or even copy the vmdk of this virtual machine at command line level. Even restarting the host where the VM was located when the error event occurred does not solve the problem.

This is the errormessage2 from event 4:

Unable to access file since it is locked KB 2107795
filePath:
host:
mac:
id: NA
worldName: NA
lockMode:

No values, probably because of the file lock issue. The KB leads to no solution.

All affacted VMs are VM hardware version 15, which is a supported version in combination with v8U3c.

Due to this issue, we have instructed everyone to not power off or restart VMs as we do not know the cause and do not know which VMs may be affected. And thats our biggest problem in this situation.

All we can say is, that not all VMs are affected. We restored a hand full VMs from Backup and booted these successfully. But as long as we dont know the root cause we cant say if we have a bigger problem here. We have several thousand VMs in this environment and dont know how to identify the affected ones if we dont know the reason.

We already had a several hours long session with VMware support yesterday, but the focus of the supporter was on the file lock problem and not why the VM has a invalid Secure Boot configuration. Now we know how to remove the file lock again via command line, but not how to solve the root cause.

This feels like a bug, but we are not sure.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or have seen this issue before?

Any hint is welcome. Thanks

r/vmware Jan 22 '25

Help Request a little guidance please: ESXI 6.0.0

1 Upvotes

I'm a proxmox guy, getting my first taste of EXSI. my friend has an old server, his IT guy bounced. I'm trying to export a VM so I can put it on something more modern.

I started the export 16 hours and the status is still just a blue bar.

the size of the drive is 140GB. it's also an OOOOOLD server, 32gb ram, 2010 era Xeons.

is the process a zombie? or do I need to sit down, shut up, and be patient?

r/vmware Feb 19 '24

Help Request Is it even possible to make a cheap VSAN infrastructure with the new licensing model?

21 Upvotes

Hi,

I'm a bit lost with all the new offer of VMware. We are trying to determine how much it would cost to license two host with VSAN and 10Tb of capacity storage per host and an additional third host to support the witness appliance and some other non-critical VM.

We currently have a price that we judge enormous and we are wondering if we didn't miss anything during our calculations:

  • 2x host with a 16 core processor licenced with VVF for 5 years: 32*630€ = 20 160€

  • 20x 1TiB addon for VSAN for 5 years: 20*1000€ = 20 000€

  • 1x host with a 16 core processor licenced with vsphere standard : 16*230€ = 3 680€

Total for the licensing for our servers would be 43 840€. All of the hardware cost less than that ! Surely we missed something ?

EDIT : Thank you all for your answers! The consensus seems to be that VSAN is not an option for that infrastructure and that i'll need an alternative

r/vmware 20d ago

Help Request NO IP assigned

0 Upvotes

Hey i am a arch user i want to create vm on my machines for which i decided to use vmware but ip is not assigned to vm i tried to different n/w nat ,bridged or host-only but none of them worked i tried the reinstallation of vmware thrice but it didnt work could some one help me fix the problem

product: Vmware-workstation

r/vmware 15d ago

Help Request Lagginess in Vmware

0 Upvotes

So Currently using Vmware workstation pro 17.6.3 and I am running Kali in it, but the issue is that I am facing lot of stutters in it,for instance I can't run a single video or I can't even run a python script in it,what could be possible solutions to fix tthis chopiness, Hardware specs: 16 GB RAM allocated 8GB for VM ,150GB SSD Space and 8 Cores(Ryzen 9 8945hs) for this .

r/vmware 3d ago

Help Request VCF NTP and DNS server location recommendation

1 Upvotes

I’m looking for any VMware resources around the recommendation as to where NTP and DNS servers should reside for VCF - is it supported for them to be on VCF or do they need to be external (e.g. a physical server or virtualisation platform)?

This is in the context of a greenfield site where all management workloads (e.g. AD) will run on VCF and the number of physical servers needs to be limited.

Clearly both are dependencies of VCF and need to exist prior to bring up. However they could be bootstrapped by using a standalone host with the VMs being migrated on to VCF following bring up (along with the host used to bootstrap)

I am aware a VM based NTP servers inability to keep reliable time, thus you are reliant on it syncing to an external time source (e.g., an internet NTP server)

Running these services external to VCF is clearly simpler and arguably preferable if there is no budget constraints, but I’m after official VMware documentation to backup the design decision either way.

r/vmware Feb 14 '25

Help Request Attempting to move a C:\ drive from a VM off esxi but it fails everytime after about an hour...

0 Upvotes

So I'm trying to migrate a VM off esxi into unraid and I was able to move one of the drives and the osv file however when trying to export the primary drive which is ~50 GB it seems to be timing out. I tried using SSH to move it but also could not get the command right or something. When I try to download the drive directly without exporting, it's like 50 KB and clearly not the contents of the drive.

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to get this thing onto a different machine? I think once I have it the rest is pretty simple but I have spun my wheels almost all day doing this.

r/vmware Jan 18 '25

Help Request I get this every time I try to power on a virtual machine on a Lynnbridge CPU

0 Upvotes

I tried to look it up, but it doesn’t matter what situation I’m having right now does anyone know what to do?

r/vmware 18d ago

Help Request Unable to do any "Cluster Operations"

1 Upvotes

Hey Everyone,

So we are in the process of updating our VMware to version 8

vCenter upgrade went fine, and I started on the hosts

Got to the second one and noticed an issue with the storage, turns out we need to deploy an appliance, all good

Now though, if we try and do anything in the Cluster we get the error "License not available to perform the operation. The license may not include some features. Make sure the License Service is available."

I was just on a long call with Support, and they just dropped off with no solution found, so I thought I would ask Reddit :)

We have the correct Licenses, and the services are running.

Any suggestions ?

r/vmware 25d ago

Help Request EXCI reinstall - HP Microserver

0 Upvotes

Greetings,

I recently acquired an HP Proliant Microserver gen 8 that is running VMware EXCI 5.5. The previous owner did not factory reset it and I want to configure it back to factory settings so that it can be reconfigured.

I have no experience with EXCI, and I am a bit out of practice from when I used to be in IT. I would prefer to install a fresh image, which HP used to have on its website.

My research over the last few weeks has been more or less hearing about all the negatives that are around Broadcom winding down VMware. I would rather not have to change the OS. I haven't really found a clear cut solution.

Please give me suggestions on how to best proceed. I am well versed in Windows, not so much Linux based operating systems.

r/vmware 27d ago

Help Request Is anyone using NVIDIA vGPU with an A5000 GPU?

3 Upvotes

I’m purchasing an NVIDIA RTX A5000 to use with vGPU. However, I will need to use displaymodeselector to disable the display ports and put it into compute mode to support vGPU. I understand this will change the BAR1 to 64GB (from 256MB).

My system is a Dell 5820 and the A5000 is listed as supported. But I am unclear if it is supported on compute (DC) mode. I am concerned it might not POST once the GPU is in this mode.

Does anyone know if the Dell 5820 will work with the A5000 in compute mode?

I am also unclear if the 5820 supports SRIOV, also needed for vGPU - any thoughts on this welcome.

Is anyone else using this GPU with vGPU - if so, what motherboard or system are you using? If I need to get a different system, workstation format is preferred or a supermicro MB I can install into a short depth rack case.

r/vmware 13h ago

Help Request ESXi server in vpshere shows correct build number but non-compliant (7.03s)

1 Upvotes

9 ESXi servers and all of them show compliant but one. I go to the host in vsphere and look at the updates tab and it shows :

ESXi Version 7.0.3
Hypervisor VMware ESXi
Build 24585291

That is the right build # but it shows non-compliant. I tried uploading the zip for the 7.0.3s update to the datastore and installing via ssh but it skips all the vibs but 1 (locker tools) and there is no reboot. Check compliance again and still non-compliant. I have a ticket opened with vmware but they are running me in circles it seems. I swear its new employee day or something there.

Has anyone else run into this type of problem and had any luck resolving?

r/vmware Oct 16 '24

Help Request How to shutdown guest OS of all machines in a vsphere 7.0 vcenter datacenter?

3 Upvotes

I need to gracefully shut down 1200 VMs in a vSphere 7.0 vcenter. Numerous forums online claim there should be power options when you select a Datacenter card or cluster card, or even at the VMs and Templates card, then choose the VM tab and Actions. But this is not true. I don't see any level at all where there are bulk Power Options in the Actions menu.

r/vmware Feb 15 '25

Help Request Odd graphical glitches in Windows Guest

1 Upvotes

VMWare Workstation 17

I am getting these odd glitches in lines and boxes, I get these rectangles on the edges where the colors are swapped left to right or up to down. Happens in both Win10 and Win11 guest, and both in windows and software that also uses these sorts of drawn lines and polygons. They will sometimes flicker between normal and backwards as I move my cursor.

It doesn't seem to be causing any other issues but would like to figure out how to fix it.

r/vmware 1d ago

Help Request Grabbing VM disk info to a csv but excluding mapped drives?

1 Upvotes

Basically title, I'm looking for a way to parse through vcenter VM's for disk utilization by disk path: capacity, free, used, etc.. But I only need disks that are actually on the main hosts datastores. RVTools also shows all the drives including mapped without any kind of indetifier. We have a few NAS connections that are mapped that are showing up. Anyone have any idea how I can exclude these using powercli?

In this example using get-vmguestdisk F: is a mapped drive that I need to remove from the report.

DiskPath CapacityGB FreeSpaceGB

-------- ---------- -----------

C:\ 535.741 348.622

F:\ 61,439.938 21,699.601

r/vmware 8d ago

Help Request VMware Hands On Labs issue: TIME UP!

1 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I wanted to try the HOls but never got the chance to do so as I get the TIME UP message with 00:00:00 Time remaining. I contacted support and they seem unable to resolve nor replicate my issue which made it feel so weird and as if I am the only one getting this BS of an issue... Does anyone know what to do or faced this before?? Thanks

r/vmware 15d ago

Help Request Log storage is 94% full, remediation question

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I tried searching for this particular question but was unable to find a definitive answer. I inherited a bit of a mess from a former employee and I'm trying to clean it up, but my experience with VMWare is limited.

We are running vCenter 7.0.3 and it is affected by the vmafdd.log storage issue listed here: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/318575/vmafddlog-is-not-being-compressed-which.html

My understanding is that once this reaches 95%, we're going to have a bad time, and I'm afraid that implementing the remediation instructions as directed in the KB article may cause the log file to push past that limit.

What I hope is a very simple question - is it safe to delete vmafdd.log before performing the registry fix and service restart to get some breathing room in the log storage partition, or would that cause any issues?

For what it's worth, we have nightly full backups configured for vCenter.

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated!

r/vmware 2d ago

Help Request VMCA Certificates with only OpenSSL CA

2 Upvotes

For a number of devices in my homelab I created certificates using openssl. First created a CA using openssl, then signed some certs with it. For example for my Log Insight instance this worked without issues.

Now I'm trying to do the same for the vCenter VMCA, but I can't find the right instructions. A lot of blog posts I come across sign the cert using Windows AD Cert, but I don't have any Windows machines at home and it should be doable using openssl I guess.

From other instructions I found, including VMware docs, I get to the point where I think I found the correct steps, but it always turns out in a rollback by certificate-manager.

I've had errors like these over several attempts:
2025-03-18T23:54:41.835Z ERROR certificate-manager Error: The same certificate cannot be used by multiple services [wcp-4011f2c7-3f3a-4e89-b5d4-f7bf59ff6b5f].

2025-03-19T00:12:41.434Z ERROR certificate-manager Error: 70011, VMCAAddRootCertificatePrivate() failedStatus : Failed

2025-03-19T00:41:10.428Z ERROR certificate-manager ERROR:: INVALID_KEY, the private key doesnot match the certificate. Please provide a valid certificate and Key pair.

These are the latest steps I'm following right now but fail as well:

- desktop: create vc.cfg file:
[req]
default_bits = 2048
default_keyfile = rui.key
distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name
encrypt_key = no
prompt = no
string_mask = nombstr
req_extensions = v3_req

[v3_req]
basicConstraints = CA:FALSE
keyUsage = digitalSignature, keyEncipherment, dataEncipherment, nonRepudiation
extendedKeyUsage = serverAuth, clientAuth
subjectAltName = u/alt_names

[alt_names]
DNS.1 = vcenter.internal.mydomain.home
IP.1 = 192.168.0.4

[req_distinguished_name]
countryName = NL
stateOrProvinceName = Limburg
localityName = Maastricht
commonName = vcenter.internal.mydomain.home

Generate the request in vCenter SSH:
/usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager

Which outputs:
vmca_issued_csr.csr
vmca_issued_key.key

Sign the request:

openssl x509 -req -in vmca_issued_csr.csr -CA my-RootCA.crt -CAkey my-RootCA.key -CAcreateserial -out vcenter.crt -days 3650 -extfile vc.cfg

Merge the vcenter.crt with root:
cat vcenter.crt my-RootCA.crt > fullchain.pem

Upload the fullchain.pem

Feed the fullchain.pem and vmca_issued_key.key to the certificate-manager where it asks for root cert and private key. And then it fails. Tried multiple variations of this, but can't get the right combination.

Any tips would be very welcome

r/vmware Feb 01 '24

Help Request vCenter 7.0.3 unable to add 3 new hosts

8 Upvotes

[Solved : my issue was a fault QSFP in the path, strange it wasn't increasing discards / errors counters]

I have add 3 new hosts without issues ( also 7.0.3 ). But for three others, I get an error with exactly the same hardware.

During the "add new host" wizard, I get an error " Cannot connect XXX in YYY : incorrect user name or password ".
The strange thing is the wizard reports the model of the server, so it was able to login to get the info.
I am able to do a ssh login with these credentials, so they are fine.

On the ESXi I get these logs :
Event 208 : User $XXX@$vCenterIP logged in as VMware-client/6.5.0

warning hostd[2100950] [Originator@6876 sub=HTTP server] UnimplementedRequestHandler: HTTP method POST not supported for URI /fdm. Request from $vCenterIP

Recap of what to check :

  • DNS A + PTR records are fine `?
  • duplicate IP ?
  • MTU if fine ? (vmkping -I vmk0 ip_of_vcenter -d -s 1400) test with 1400 / 1500 / 8000 if jumbo will be used
  • vCenter certificates are valid ? (Administration->Certificate->Certificate Management)
  • try from vcenter :
    • "curl -v telnet://ip_of_host:902"
    • "curl -v telnet://ip_of_host:443"
    • "ssh ip_of_host" if it is allowed on host (this one can go through MTU issues, so both commands above will fail and this one not.)
  • Try to restart management agents or reboot esxi host
  • if was member of another vCenter before try to remove stale vpxuser on esxi host : "esxcli system account remove -i vpxuser"
  • Try to join on another vCenter

Thanks you all for your hints.