Rebuilding Distributed Switch on New vCenter Instance Using a Backup

As you may have seen, I recently had a vCenter fail and after working with VMware Support it was determined that the vCenter should be rebuilt from scratch. Rebuilding the vCenter and adding the hosts that were in it was fairly easy. However, restoring their networking was another story. The hosts retained their previous network configuration, but I was unable…

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Configuring VMware Backup with BDRSuite: A Step by Step Guide

If you’re looking to backup your VMware environment without having to install agents, then take a look at BDRSuite by Vembu! BDRSuite for VMware offers agentless VM Backup/Recovery for ESXi and vCenter as well as VM Replication Failover/Failback! Replication jobs have the ability to set up network and IP Mapping between source and destination environments for automatic Re-IPing in the…

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Rebuilding a Failed vCenter Results in More Problems

At work, I had a vCenter fail and, after working with VMware support for hours, I was told to rebuild the vCenter from scratch. I downloaded the vCenter ISO for the same version as the other vCenters that are linked (7.0.3.01700) and launched the installer. I went through the wizard and selected to join it to the existing SSO Domain.…

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BDRSuite’s VMware Backup Solution – My Review

I’ve been using BDRSuite in my homelab for a while now. I wanted to write a quick review of the product based on my experience so far. When I first started with BDRSuite, I was using version 5.0. I’ve been a part of the journey through to version 5.6 and now to 7.0. I’ve seen the product improve greatly along…

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PowerShell Script to Login to Multiple vCenter Servers

Do you have multiple vCenter servers that you interact with on a daily basis? Do you like to use PowerShell to manage them? I was opening a PowerShell window, and doing a connect-viserver for each and having to enter my PW over and over again. First, I tried to use the New-VICredentialStoreItem command to store my PW, but with security…

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VMware VM Replication using BDRSuite – Overview

Ensuring the availability and continuity of vital virtual machines (VMs) is crucial in the fast-paced commercial world of today. VMware virtual machine replication with BDRSuite provides an affordable and dependable way to protect your important virtual machines. This comprehensive guide will take you through the main advantages, features, and best practices for using BDRSuite to create virtual machine replication. Key…

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Upgrading VMware Tools on each ESXi Host via ESXCLI

Have you ever wanted to upgrade the version of VMware Tools on your hosts but you’re having an issue with Update Manger/Lifecycle Manager? I ran into this problem recently. I was attempting to upgrade my hosts to the latest version of VMware Tools and even though the remediation completed successfully via Lifecycle Manger finished successfully, each host still reported at…

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Deploying Vembu BDR Suite (Part 3 – Configuration)

After you install Vembu, the first thing you you need to do is LOGIN! Once you double click and launch Vembu BDR, you’re prompted to sign-in. Now that we’re signed in, you can see the first step is adding a backup target. Lets click CREATE NEW BLOCK STORAGE REPOSITORY and get started! First, we need to give it a name.…

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New Vembu BDR Suite Release (version 5.2.0)

Earlier this month, April 2022, Vembu released version 5.2.0. This version has some great new features I thought I’d feature here. Restore to Microsoft Azure BDRSuite now allows restoring the VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, Windows Server & Workstation backups to Microsoft Azure. You can initiate the restore directly from your BDRSuite Backup server or Offsite DR Server. BDRSuite 360 Server…

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VMware Top 100 Influencers

Back in December, I was contacted by Noell Grier, with the VMware communities team, to join the VMware Influencer 100 Club Welcome and Kickoff Meeting! I was shocked to be included in this list. It’s been fun being part of this program! Thank you to Noell and VMware for the honor of being a part of this program! I’ve known…

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