This hands-on lab shows how to deploy a nested Dell PowerFlex 3.6.4 cluster on VMware vSphere. The environment uses virtual machines to model PowerFlex storage nodes, a five-node MDM cluster, VLAN-separated traffic, a PowerFlex Gateway, a Presentation Server, and Windows and ESXi Storage Data Clients (SDCs). Lab warning: This is a nested learning environment. It is intended to demonstrate PowerFlex…

The vim-cmd utility is one of the most useful command-line tools available on a VMware ESXi host. It allows administrators to inspect and manage virtual machines directly from the ESXi Shell or through an SSH session, which can be especially useful when troubleshooting a host or when the vSphere Client is unavailable. In this practical guide, I will show several…

Last week, I rebooted a physical Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 server after applying security updates that included a new kernel. The reboot itself completed normally, but there was one unexpected result: none of the Docker containers came back online. This was a DEV server running Docker Engine with several containers. I expected the applications to return automatically after the…

Patching the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) updates its software and can address product defects and security issues. This guide explains how to apply a full patch ISO from the Appliance Shell by staging its packages, reviewing the staged release, installing the update, and rebooting the appliance. The patch process interrupts vCenter Server services and requires a maintenance window. Before…

Using iPerf3 on an ESXi host is a practical way to measure network throughput between virtualization endpoints and verify whether a specific network path is delivering the performance expected from the infrastructure. In this lab, I will use the iPerf3 utility available on ESXi to test traffic between two ESXi hosts and between an ESXi host and a virtual machine.…