AutoDeploy Failed to convert ItemList

When working with VMware vSphere AutoDeploy and creating or editing rules I sometimes get the following error when running a Get-DeployRule: “Failed to convert ItemList to VI Object: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object” (See screenshot).

Often I also have one or more rules not working correctly then. Turns out that an unsupported character had been using when creating the rule. This sometimes happens when using your comma’s or spaces incorrectly. Then the command seems to work but the properties end up in the incorrect fields. [Read more...]

VKernel interview at Dutch VMUG

At the Dutch VMUG on December 9th, 2011 I was asked to do a little interview with Alex Rosemblat from VKernel. We spoke about the presentation I did at the VMUG in which I talked about my VMware vSphere Health Check. See the pages about the Health Check in the top menu bar.

Also check out VKernel’s latest release of VKernel vOperations Suite which offers a great way to do performance and capacity management of your vSphere and Hyper-V environment.

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Sorry Alex about the part after 5min10 :-)

VMware vSphere Health Check

At the Dutch VMUG event 2011 I gave a presentation on how to check your VMware environment to make sure it is healthy. When creating the presentation I had a lot of doubts because I was afraid everyone would think these points were very obvious. But on the other hand, when visiting customers and doing these health checks for them, I found a lot of those “obvious” issues in their environment. I decided to stick to my plan and test the audience and it turned out they were very happy with my presentation and I saw a lot of people in the audience taking notes. The replies afterwards also showed that for many people there were a lot of eye-openers in this presentation. I therefore decided to convert the power point presentation into this blogpost and hope my readers find it a valuable health check.

In the top menu bar of this blog you’ll find the “Health Check” section. There you can find the various pages that together give you a complete health check.

Updating your ESXi host using VMware vSphere 5 Auto deploy

In my previous post on VMware vSphere5 Auto deploy I explained how to setup an auto deploy environment. This is great for initial setup and to deploy your hosts, but what when an update is released by VMware? The easiest thing is to just delete the deploy rules and recreate them which is ok for a small environment but not in a large environment. In this post I will show you how to adjust your existing rules. [Read more...]

Upgrading VMware vCenter Heartbeat 6.3 update 1 to 6.4

When preparing your Virtual Infrastructure environment for vSphere 5 and vCenter 5 you also need to think of all the vCenter applications that are dependent on vCenter. One of  them is vCenter Heartbeat. To be able to run vCenter Heartbeat on vCenter 5 you will need to upgrade vCenter Heartbeat to version 6.4. Normally upgrading vCenter Heartbeat isn’t a big deal but there has been a change from 6.3 Update 1 to 6.4. Where you could normally use a configuration of “identical nodes”, you will now have to switch to “non-identical nodes” according to KB 1014435.

From the KB article: “Important: When performing an upgrade to vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.4 from 6.3 Update 1 with Identical nodes or from any previous version, you must first migrate from Identical nodes to Non-Identical nodes before performing the upgrade.”

[Read more...]