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How to restart the new Mac mini M1 in recovery mode?

I recently purchased one of the newer Mac mini devices with the new M1 chipset. Unfortunately I went with the lower edition that had 256 GB and I wanted to send it back to purchase the bigger 512 GB edition, but I wanted to clean my installation. In order to to boot in the recovery mode to reinstall the os I had to perform the following steps: Make sure the Mac mini is off, if its not off just shut it off Hold the power button until the options appear, it might seem like a long time but keep holding it. It took about 15 seconds for me. A menu should appear that shows the hard drive and Options. Select options and continue You will see the apple logo and then a new menu should appear with additional options. It would look like this: ...

November 22, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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Patching\Upgrading ESXi 7 to ESXi7U1 via esxcli

With the latest release of ESXi7U1 i wanted to get my lab up to date. I dont have enough resources in my lab to migrate the vCenter to another ESXi server so i want to perform the upgrade via cli. More details about the release can found here The first step was to open the firewall for outgoing traffic for http esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient Second step was to list the updates by executing ...

October 28, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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ESXi No space left on device error when upgrading

While i was trying to perform an upgrade to my ESXi installation i ran in to the below error: The fix was pretty simple. The hypervisor doesnt have enough space to download and install the package so we need to enable one of the available datastores for the function. For vCenter go to the host in question to Configure -> System -> System Swap While reviewing the configuration i noticed that i had 2 options enabled ...

October 28, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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Upgrading VCF 4.0.1.1 to 4.1.0.0

With the release of of VCF 4.1 i wanted to get my lab upgraded. The release blog can be found here and the release notes are here In my case i pre downloaded the VMware Cloud Foundation Update 4.1.0.0 by going to Repository -> Bundle management -> Download now The next step is to upgrade VCF by going to Inventory -> Workload Domains -> Select the workload domain -> Update/Patches -> Update Now ...

October 14, 2020 · 3 min · Cosmin
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Unable to Sync Lifecycle Manager 'integrity.fault.HostPatchInvalidVendorCode'

After upgrading my vCenter Server to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 1, I was unable to see ESXi 7.0 Update 1 Image. When I attempted to sync the updates I got the error “Download patch definitions task failed while syncing depots. Error: ‘integrity.fault.HostPatchInvalidVendorCode’.” Seeing as the error mentioned the depots, navigate to Menu->Lifecycle Manager and then select the Settings tab and then Patch Setup. Select the radio button for Partner provided Addons for ESXi and click Disable. Proceed to click on Action and then Sync Updates. The sync should now complete successfully. ...

October 10, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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vCLS not starting with Insufficient resources message

With the release of vCenter 7 Update 1, VMware introuced the vCLS (vSphere Clustering Service). More information can be found here. Looking at the error details it looks like it is looking for a feature called cpuid.mwait Reviewing the VMX file it seems like EVC is enabled on the vCLS VMs. I didnt want to enable EVC on the whole cluster so i wanted to do it only on the specific VMs. ...

October 10, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin

Extracting SSL Thumbprint

I recently ran in to an issue where i had to re-register my NSX server with vIDM. The ask was to extract the Thumbprint from vIDM. The command i ran to extract it was: echo -n | openssl s_client -connect hostname:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha256 This can be used across multiple products where the Thumbprint needs to be extracted

October 10, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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vRealize Operation Endpoint Agent (EPops) Unable to register error

While i was doing the operations endpoint install on a new vROPS environment i experienced an strange error that i didnt see before - Unable to register the agent due to server error. In order to find the issue i had to log in to my vROPS server in order to review the logs. I was able to find the End Point Adapter log file here: /storage/log/vcops/log/adapters/EndPointAdapter/ While reviewing the log i found a strange error pointing me to the adapter ...

September 27, 2020 · 2 min · Cosmin
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Adding keys in vRealize Lifecycle Manager in a VCF 4 Environment

From a lifecycle manager perspective we have a couple of ways to add keys to the environment If the my vmware user that is added to lifecycle manager has access to they keys, the keys can automatically discovered and imported. For this we can go to the locker from Home -> Locker -> License. If the keys are not discovered we can click on the refresh button up top to perform a manual sync ...

September 13, 2020 · 1 min · Cosmin
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Deploying vRA with vRealize Lifecycle Manager in a VCF 4 Environment

If you followed my previous posts Deploying the vRealize suite using VCF 4.0 and vRealize Lifeycycle Manager (vRSLCM) enable product dowloads you should now have vRA and vIDM already downloaded. In my previous post i went over the installation of vIDM which is a pre requisite for vRA. You can find the link here Next, we need to create a new environment that will be used to deploy vRA. For this we can go to Lifecycle Operations -> Create Environment. Fill in the necessary information and click next ...

September 13, 2020 · 2 min · Cosmin
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