Articles by 'Carlo Costanzo'

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Recent developments from Broadcom regarding VMware's offerings have sparked significant discussions within our organization and our client base. As we dive deeper into these changes, I thought I would write this blog post to discuss two recent changes that I have been asked about and their potential impacts. The End of an Era: Discontinuation of ESXi Free With over a decade of availability, VMware has decided to discontinue the free version of its ESXi hypervisor (versions 7.x and 8.x), marking the end of... read more.

• February 16, 2024

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Security, Virtualization

During our internal tech brief, Tim Husar brought to everyone’s attention a new vulnerability announced by VMware. This critical issue involves an out of bounds write vulnerability in the implementation of the DCERPC protocol. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Critical Severity Range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 9.8. The write vulnerability could allow a malicious actor to execute remote code. The issue affects most versions of vCenter in production and VMware has... read more.

• October 25, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

VMware released vCenter Server 8.0 Update 2 recently, so it’s time to upgrade the HomeLab. The process of upgrading is pretty straight forward (assuming no complications) and starts in the vCenter UI admin interface located on port 5480. Find the update and process the upgrade. It is about 8 GB, so it could take a while to download and install. What’s New With Update 2? With a successful upgrade, you are now on the latest version of vCenter. This includes your basic security and performa... read more.

• October 12, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Content Libraries For those entrenched in virtualization, vSphere's Content Libraries are no stranger. Despite their glaring advantages, the adoption rate has been sluggishly low, primarily because of traditionalist tendencies. Yes, you guessed it right, I'm talking about those dedicated LUNs still holding ISOs like it's 2005. I get it, it's comfortable to stick with what you know, but hear me out: Content Libraries in vSphere aren't just a fancier vessel for your ISOs. They are the bedrock for a more robu... read more.

• September 20, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

In my opinion, home labs are awesome. One of the best ways for you to learn software is to actually run it in your house on a home lab and have the ability to test out solutions, features, upgrades, and break fixes without having to worry about impacting your user base at work. The major drawback in running a home lab is cost. Often times, the gear is expensive (even when purchased used) and the cost to power the lab can also be excessive. Sure, you can spin things up in the cloud, but for me, I find witho... read more.

• August 25, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

Sometimes with VMware solutions, you need to install a custom vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB). There are VIBs for Nvidia GPUs, storage VIBs, and many others. In this post, let’s talk about how you can use Lifecycle Manager to install VIBs, rather than messing around with the Command Line as most of the instructions would have you do. What is a VIB? A VIB is a package containing software that you can install on a VMware ESXi host. It is typically a ZIP file containing the kernel modules, scripts, a... read more.

• August 16, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Do you have any Raw Disk Mappings (RDMs) in your environment? If so, you might want to learn more about Clustered VMDKs. Clustered VMDKs vs RDMs Before Clustered VMDKs, clients would have to use RDMs to present a shared disk between VMs. RDMs were basically LUNs passed directly through the ESXi host to the Virtual Machines. The cluster software then handled writes and locking directly with the SAN. You could abstract the interactions a bit more by using Virtual Raw Disk Mappings (vRDMs), but the gist of t... read more.

• July 27, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

While working on some older DL360’s, I ran into the infamous Purple Screen of Death. Similar to Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death, this occurs when there is a kernel panic in Linux variants that result in a system halt. This typically is due to a driver issue, hardware issue, or in my case, a recent patch. When I patched the system, the ESXi host restarted as normal, but got stuck on a task appropriately called VMK Shutdown: World_DestroyAllUsersWorlds. The task hung for a few minutes and the... read more.

• July 07, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

In an article posted last month, Tim Husar demonstrated how to reset an ILO password on a VMware ESXi host without any downtime. Today, I want to show you a different variation of that process, tailored for an older ILO card operating with an earlier version of ESXi. Since we are using tools that are native on the ESXi HPE custom build, depending on which version you are running, you might need to run different tools. In our case, we had an ILO 5 running on a 6.7 ESXi host. We were running through our upgr... read more.

• June 21, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Storage

If you're unfamiliar with Robware's RVTools, you're definitely missing out. This practical tool provides a clean and uncomplicated interface to view essential information about your Virtual Machines. The feature I find most valuable is the SnapShot tab. By pointing RVTools towards your VirtualCenter, you can access a concise list of all VMs with snapshots. Basic details including the date, description, and power state are also conveniently displayed. If you're working with other groups outside your own, RV... read more.

• June 14, 2023