I run a Debian VM with Plex on, and I pass through the iGPU which can be used by Plex for transcoding. Depending on the model of Intel CPU, the Integrated GPU is quite powerful for Plex transcoding and it has become a widely chosen option rather than buying a discrete GPU for the task. This fix works for Plex running natively on a VM only, I don’t run it in a docker. William Lam has already blogged about how you can pass the iGPU through to a VM so I won’t be covering that. Please check out his blog for instructions. The issue I was having is that sometimes Plex would not detect the iGPU and f ..read more

I’ve seen a few cases in the field where a HCX Manager has been deployed onto the same network which is use by workload VMs, and to make matters worse, the network is in scope for being stretched and then moved to the target environment. The issue here is that when you come to unstretch a network post VM migration activity, the same network the HCX manager is using to talk to the hosts, vCenter etc, and far side manage, you effectively gate yourself from ever being able to remove the stretch without causing a lot of headaches. There are clear reasons why this may appear to be unavoidable espec ..read more

Following on from my previous post on HCX+, I’ll now cover the next stage in the process. Apologies for the delay, I’ve been enjoying some time off work! As a very quick recap, so far both our on-prem and SDDC HSM appliances have been deployed and activated. If we use the UI to try and pair sites, it will tell use that the on-prem site must be configured first. This is effectively configuring the Compute and Network profiles as we do with regular HCX. Clicking on configure site will take you to the following screen. Clicking on Continue Configuration takes you to a screen where you start con ..read more

I previously blogged that you can install and enabled FRR on a UniFi UDM (or UDM SE) running UniFi OS 3.0.x. which gives you the ability to run BGP; in my case I was using it to talk to my NSX-T Tier-0 Edge. I noticed I started getting some weird issues after the first 3.1.x was installed (3.1.8 I think) and after a few posts on the UniFi forums a member of staff confirmed that the reason I was having issues is that I had manually installed FRR and UniFi also now bundle FRR to support their Magic VPN functionality. It would have been great if this was called out in the release notes and I may ..read more

Sometime in 2017 when I was doing freelance consulting, I was in the middle of a vSphere upgrade from 6 to 6.5 for a client of mine, and it went a little bit wrong. I opened a GSS case with VMware support and after a few things were checked, it still wasn’t working. To make matters worse, the install was in ELM and one of the PSCs (remember those?) was upgraded, the other was not, and only one of the vCenter servers would start its services. It was a bit of a mess if I’m honest. I can’t remember the specifics. Ultimately, production wasn’t down, so VMware support’s view of the urgency was not ..read more

This post is a work in progress. I can’t guarantee that this will work through a reboot This works through a reboot but might not after firmware upgrade, so make sure to back up the config files. I’ve also not extensively tested it so I don’t know if it has any inadvertent effects on the UniFi OS or its applications. This is also completely unsupported by Ubiquti so proceed at your own risk. I will endeavour to update once I’ve done some further testing. If you end up with a bricked device, do not blame me is what I’m saying! To back out, if all else fails, factory reset the SE. It goes withou ..read more

A question came up in an internal Slack channel whether VMware had written a guide on installing the OS Assisted Migration (OSAM) Sentinel Agent via Microsoft’s SCCM (now called Endpoint Manager) software. I don’t think such a guide exists, so I thought ‘how hard can it be?’ and decided to give it a go. The answer is… more difficult than I thought! But this would be very simple for experienced SCCM administrators. It’s actually something which would be very beneficial to many customers looking to leverage HCX to migrate their Hyper-V VMs into a vSphere environment such as VMC on AWS or VCF. Cu ..read more

For my home firewall I’ve recently switched from using a UniFi USG Pro to a virtual Untangle Next Generation Firewall (Untangle NG Firewall) appliance. The USG has served me well, however with no future developments for USG firmware, it’s starting to show its age somewhat. More advanced VPN support is lacking, there’s no 10 Gbps LAN, and having to configure anything not exposed in the GUI via the config.gateway.json file is a bit of a headache when you start looking into BGP peering with an NSX Edge as an example. I could go on, but that is not the point of this post! I looked at the Dream Mac ..read more

Site Recovery Manager is used primarily as a Disaster Recovery tool, it can however be used for Disaster Avoidance and for VM migrations. I’m going to show how you can use SRM to migrate VMs using vSphere Replication between your on-prem datacenter and VMC on AWS. Before we start, we need to deploy SRM and protect a VM. So head to your SDDC > Add Ons then Activate Under SRM. After pressing on Activate you’ll be presented with this set of instructions. Press on Activate. The process will take around 10 minutes, so download the SRM components including vSphere Replication if not already don ..read more

In this series of blog posts I will explain how you can migrate your on-prem datacenter to VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS. Although I will mainly cover migration, the same premise can be used for extending your workloads and using the cloud to simply scale up as required or permanently running a hybrid linked mode setup. VMC on AWS is a fully managed vSphere environment in collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Many customers are using VMC on AWS to migrate or extend their primary datacenter. The series will include a number of parts details below (with some placeholders). Part 1 – Creating a sit ..read more