Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was working on my VMware Explore 2024 session about networking and needed a demo. You should come and see me at explore at my session or the Hands On Labs. I went through the “normal” things and got one demo done. My session is about networking so a lot of the demos I canContinue reading “GPU over IP in AVS”

Been having some internal conversation about the CrowdStrike outages. We needed a way to quickly boot VMs that were affected and allow them to get on the network for easy file deletion and reboots. So some of my colleagues and myself got to work on it. First we needed a way to set the bootContinue reading “Start a VMware VM to Safe Mode With Networking Automatically”

Does anyone still use resxtop? VMware/Broadcom must not think so. The instructions for installation don’t include all the steps necessary for sure. The instructions are located here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.monitoring.doc/GUID-194D583E-EFDC-44DF-AF3C-625974815766.html This may change as Broadcom updates all the doc pages. But for now it’s correct. The instructions for installation on Ubuntu are: Installing RESXTOP on Linux systemsContinue reading “resxtop on a modern Linux version?”

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”