vCenter Server

One thing we have been meaning to do for a while but haven’t got round to is getting our Virtual Center Servers into “Linked” mode - essentially to provide a single pane of glass view of our entire virtual estate. One vCenter resides on the other side of our DMZ and manages hosts isolated for security purposes. I’ve created an IPSec server-to-server connection and allowed that through the firewall to secure traffic between the DMZ VC and LAN VC.

In vSphere 5.1 “Tags” replace the old custom attributes to provide a way of adding metadata to vSphere objects. The “Tags” are organised into categories to “define how the tags can be applied to inventory objects”. The easiest way to think of the difference is that custom attributes are “free text” and the tags are statically defined properties. There is a wizard for converting custom attributes to tags, but it can get a bit confusing and is pretty poor - let me explain.

I’m migrating some hosts off of an older storage LUN, but when I drag the disk to the new Datastore with the SVMotion plug-in the job fails with the following error: The error occurs because the virtual disk cannot be moved without moving the source files, the .vmx, .vswap etc. Simply drag the entire VM, rather than the virtual disk to the new Datastore. If you’re trying to move a 2nd, 3rd or nth disk and you get this error, drag the entire VM as per above over to the new Datastore, once that’s completed, go back in to SVMotion and drag the whole VM across again, only this time before you apply, drag the nth disk back to the new Datastore.