While being at a customer site last week, I was asked if I could help with a mysterious VMFS datastore behavior. That particular datastore out of a sudden became none accessible and they could not carry out any changes to it. They can not VMotion in or out of it, or even create a folder into it. After running Storage Adapters Rescan on some of the ESXi hosts, they could not view that datastore any more. Checking out the logs at /var/log/vmkernel.log, we have noticed the error “ATS-Only VMFS Volume ‘VMFS5′ not mounted. Host does not support ATS or ATS initialization has failed.” shown in the below screenshot (Double Click it for full size).

What is Atomic Test & Set (ATS)?

Before I go about explaining the cause of the above error & how to resolve it, I thought it will make  sense to share some background about ATS and where is the idea of ATS-Only VMFS Volumes has came from which directly relate to the cause of this problem.

Atomic Test & Set (ATS) was introduced as one of the fundamentals operations of vStorage API Array Integration(VAAI). ATS is used during creation and locking of files on the VMFS volume.… Read More

While working with my home vSphere 5.1 lab the other day, I was trying to create a VMFS5 datastores on my local SATA disk. Each time I tried to do that I was just welcomed with the following error:

Call “HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed.

Please note xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx stand for my host IP. To visualize the error below is a screen shot of the error as it has appeared in my home lab

After fuzzing around trying to figure out what happened, I have remembered this particular disk was used by one of my old lab ESXi hosts. As I do all kind of crazy things in my labs, I thought I should try to wipe the disk clean then try to format it with VMFS5 afterward. That has actually solved the problem. This error seems to happen if you have a file system on that LUN/disk that ESXi does not understand, cannot overwrite or if You don’t have a full write access to the disk/LUN(ex: SRM replication target)

Below is how I went about doing it if you are not familiar with the procedure:

Note: In previous versions of ESXi fdisk was your friend in such a situation, though if you try it in vSphere 5.x… Read More

In earlier versions of VMware vSphere, many of us used to configure VMware tools settings by double clicking VMware tools inside the guest OS. This was most often used to configure NTP in the Virtual Machine VMware tools. Just to remind you of what that looked like:

Alright if you try to do the same in vSphere 5.1, you will be surprised that you will not have any options to choose when double clicking on VMware tools inside the guest OS. What you will get will look like the below screen shot:

Maybe what I have mentioned so far is already what you know and its why you got here. Now let’s cover how you can configure your VMware Tools to sync the VM time with your host. The way this is done in vSphere 5.1 is a bit different. You actually don’t need to login to the VM to change VMware tools setting & in most use cases the VMware Tools NTP Sync setting, but now you can do it from the VMware setting page. The VMware tools settings now can be accessed  in Virtual Machine –> Edit Settings –> Options –> VMware Tools. The below screenshot show just how to set it up.… Read More

I know most of my readers are already aware that Microsoft Exchange & Microsoft SQL have been supported on VMware vSphere for quite long time. In fact, there is so many companies are using it at unbelievably large production scale. Though today while going back from my customer site by train, I was talking to two of their engineers. One of them worked within their Virtual Infrastructure team & the other one within their Microsoft Infrastructure team. What sparked the idea of this post is when the Virtual Infrastructure engineer asked his colleagues what he think of virtualizing their Exchange 2010 setup. The shocking answer was “Our Exchange 2010 environment is too large to be virtualized as we have about 10,000 users. Further, if we virtualize we have have to use Hyper-V to be supported by Microsoft although I know it will run better on VMware vSphere.”

Let me address the status of Microsoft support for running MS Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere, as it seems there is a lot of misleading believe that Microsoft Exchange 2010 is only supported on Hyper-v. Unfortunately, this seems to be fueled even further by few Microsoft Sales Reps that does not play fair and welling to do anything to win a deal even by misrepresenting facts.… Read More

While data security has always been one of the top CEOs concerns for the past decade or so, more compliance regulation has been hitting organizations doors every year. After organizations have mastered how to secure their physical environment by using physical segregation, Virtualization came around and changed the security game. Now organizations has to ensure that their Virtual Infrastructures are meeting compliance regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and FISMA. Trying to manually keep up with such regulations that get updated regularly can be an endless hassle, & that why VMware has released vCenter Configuration Manager few years back.

vCenter Configuration Manager can help organizations not only audit their virtual infrastructure against compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Federal information Security Act (FISMA), but as well it help you audit your environment against vSphere best practices including vSphere Security best practices. vCenter Configuration Manager can even help you re-mediate your environment to ensure it is meeting such regulation where many of those remediation can be carried out automatically others will include the recommendations on how to fix it. vCenter Configuration Manager is not limited to the vSphere Infrastructure, but it can check physical machines, Windows/Linux/Unix OS, & even applications for such compliance.… Read More