Author Archives: Kenyon Hensler

There is a lot of information around about generating VMware zdump files. These files are the way ESXi stores information about a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). Normally an ESXi host attempts to write these files to disk during a crash. It can also send this file over the network to the vmware-netdumper service. ThisContinue reading “VMware netdumper and zdumps”

Much like running a vCenter Server in an Azure VM I decided to try NSX Manager. Pretty much had the same experience except that NSX reads it’s configuration from a file: /config/guestinfo. This file is a dump from vmtoolsd –cmd “info-get guestinfo”. The file looks something like: Same type of script to build the disks as with vCenter:Continue reading “NSX Manager as an Azure VM”

Now I know why you’re thinking. “Kenyon, that’s easy just V2V it.” Or “That’s not supported so don’t do it.” For those of you who don’t know me a story is in order first. I was building a screen porch out of my tiny front porch at my old house. Now we are talking somethingContinue reading “Installing vCenter as an Azure VM”

A few years ago I found an interesting vulnerability in the VMware Hands On Labs. I reported it and it got fixed but I found out at VMware Explore this year that I can disclose what I found. So 3 or 4 years later here we go. TLDR: outbound connections to any IP from internetContinue reading “VMware Hands On Labs Vulnerability”

I’m sure we’ve all used VM backup utilities that allow for access to base VMDKs for backups. There are a couple of way this works. Hotadd just adds a snapshotted disk to a backup proxy and it reads the base disk. You can backup via block or file this way. There are a couple ofContinue reading “VMware Disk Access”

Quick post today. I was looking for how to deploy HCX via powershell to my AVS cloud. There didn’t seem to be any examples and the documentation was hard to read. So in case someone else needs it: Not to hard just not well documented. You will need to set your environmental variables correctly.

I’ve wanted to test out NVME over TCP as a datastore from an ESXi host for some time. You may say “But Kenyon the Linux NVME implementation doesn’t support fused commands.” And you’d be right at one point I went through the configuration of an NVME target via the nvmet-cli tools. While this works forContinue reading “NVME over TCP”

Ran into something odd the other day. I was observing a 30 second power on delay for VMs on an ESXi host. I messed with it for a few weeks, dug through logs, and opened a VMware SR. Got nothing from all of the normal avenues. After the ticket was open for a good weekContinue reading “ESXi VM Power On Delay”

A while ago I wrote a post about ICMP latency: https://vskeeball.com/2021/09/14/ping-is-not-a-real-latency-measurement/. While we all conceptually understand this I recently helped build a testing framework to show a few types of tests running from AVS to Azure Native. Actually seeing the data brought home the points from the last post. These tests were all run oneContinue reading “TCP/UDP vs ICMP Latency”

I recently had a question from a colleague about how to move the gateway for a layer 2 extended network in HCX. The move gateway operation in HCX forces you to unextend the network. This is fine if all the workloads on the segment have been migrated but the story I’ve always been told andContinue reading “NSX-T HCX or L2 VPN and VDR MAC”