So Chrome 73 brought in Dark Mode support on MacOS Mojave. I use Dark Mode, but I'm not 100% sold on using Dark Mode in Chrome - mostly because it's so similar to Incognito Mode. There is no toggle mode within Chrome to disable it - it inherits it from the OS, but if you... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: Reducing the Maximum Size of a Virtual Disk with VMware Fusion / Workstation
Have you ever built a VM and went a bit nuts in terms of the initial maximum size you allocated to the VMDK? Something like this? I know I have. Extending a virtual disk with VMware Fusion is a piece of cake, but shrinking one (and by shrinking I mean reducing the maximum size of... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: Cleaning up VMware HCX for a Demo
Following on from the VMware HCX Breadcrumb Build, I was aiming to cut a demo video and wanted to clean up the migration history of the workloads I had run test migrations on. It's one thing showing a lot of successful runs, but who wants to capture that one failed run where you forgot to... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: Unregistering a vCenter from SSO
Ever entered a typo when building a vCenter, and redeploying seemed the easiest way forward? Or just want to decommission and old vCenter from an SSO domain? Well its not as easy as powering off the VM and deleting it. At least not unless you want annoying pop errors when you log into your remaining... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: Removing Phantom Entries from vSphere Licensing
Sometimes, if you've killed a vSphere object in a less than 100% graceful fashion, you end up with phantom entries in your license screen. In this case we have a phantom vCenter, but it could equally be an ESXi host etc. There are a couple of ways to tackle this, but I used JXplorer (http://jxplorer.org/downloads/).... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: NSX Distributed Firewall Rule locked you out of vCenter?
Just recently, while manually installing VVD 4.3 on VxRail I ran into an issue whereby I managed to lock myself out of vCenter due to an errant firewall rule. It's easy to do. When setting up a Security Group and adding an IP set, you need first select the IP set to add, then click to... Continue Reading →
Pro Tip: What is this series of posts about?
Short and simple, these posts are about digging yourself out of holes that you have managed to fall into. Usually by not paying attention. With my colleagues and friends the words 'Pro Tip' are normally followed by the word 'Don't' and then a description of a really numbskull move 🙂