Storage issues! One thing that has baffled me (and VMware GSS it seems) is why when a host looses it storage does it sometimes just goes unresponsive on the management side? I've seen this multiple times with multiple storage vendors. Say an APD event occurs. Most of the time the host recovers after the storage comes back, but sometimes it doesn't. This results in a host that is unresponsive to management commands, even the console.

With the impending demise of the EPOPS agent, I was hopeful the newer lighter Telegraph agent would fully replicate the functionality. While the new agent is relatively easy to push from the console and it does a great job with built-in apps, monitoring custom services does not appear to be a feature. With EPOPS you could monitoring custom Windows services, even use a custom script. Now (with Linux as well), it appears this functionality is gone.

I want to post this because I've found the documentation and steps very unclear from VMware in regards to this. Say your security policy requires federated identities. Put simply you CANNOT just use a VMware account you create in the cloud; you MUST use your on-prem credentials (we'll use AD in this case). So how do you do that? Well it's a combination of VMware Identity Manager Connector and a VMware Identity Manager* tenant in the cloud.

I cannot take credit for this, but I wanted to put it out there for all to see and understand. It originally was shown to me by Jayson Block (VCDX). There are key areas that go into desining IT systems. We probably hear them all the time - realiblity, stability, etc. Let's outline them here. This specifically can relate to VMware in this case. There are a number of academic articles discussing engineering ilities but I thought it useful here to focus on VMware.

There seems to be issues with auto-upgrading VMware tools to the newest version on some 2012 instances. The tools will install but will crash constantly. Trouble is it's not all of them. While I haven't been able to pinpoint the issue I have found a workaround. If you uninstall the tools with setup /c and then remove ALL files from the VMware Tools directory under Program Files, then a clean install will succeed.