Cannot change Virtual Machine settings:
I had a VM that in the vCenter console I could not change any of the hardware; the OK button was greyed out. If I "Launched the Remote Console" I could change things. Except for the hard drive, it claimed the maximum size it could be expanded to was the current size, and if I tried to resize it I was greated with: "expand disk capacity specified parameter is incorrect dc" Turns out the issue was the virtual serial port was connected. Dispite being able to vmotion the VM. Disconnect it and all was well!
Storage vMotion fails with Error 195887107
In the VMware documentation, it occurs on the virtual machines that have disks with the multi-writer attribute. While in my environment the virtual machine was not like this, after a bit of Google searching, I found a hint in one of the forums that said the error is related to disk size.
Solution
Add 1 GB of space to each disk of the virtual machine to re-size each disk by a factor of 1 MB and then I ran a storage vMotion task on the virtual machine and it completed successfully, but why 1 MB? because of the following description.
“The size of a virtual volume must be a multiple of 1 MB, with a minimum size of 1 MB. As a result, all virtual disks that you provision on a virtual datastore or migrate from any datastore other than the virtual datastore should be an even multiple of 1 MB in size. If the virtual disk you migrate to the virtual datastore is not an even multiple of 1 MB, extend the disk manually to the nearest even multiple of 1 MB.”
Refrence
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-EDCF74B5-F652-4F2D-9678-1B188684691D.html?hWord=N4IghgNiBcILYFcIBcCWAHCBTAzgAgHsAzPOAIxAF8g
Thanks to: Yahya Zahedi in the VMware Communities
Cannot change host swap file location
Added a new host to the cluster; the VMware cluster is set to have the host specifiy where VM swap file location is. In the section to make this change all the options are greyed out. Thanks to u/eldego over at Reddit, that this is a bug in the GUI, using the keyboard (arrows and spacebar) to make the slections works. This bug was fixed in VCSA 7.0 U3a.
Cannot create a new datastore:
From vCenter: Task Name: Update disk partitions and Status: Cannot change the host configuration.
From ESXi: Description Creates a new VMFS datastore: State Failed - Cannot change the host configuration.
Errors Failed to update disk partitions for /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.600508b1001c3bfffd4fd3a4b8856609.
Quoting "Cookies04" from the VMware Communities
1. Show connected disks.
ls -lha /vmfs/devices/disks/
(Verify the disk is seen. You will probably see your disk ID then :1. This is a partition on the disk. We only need to work about the main disk ID.)
2. Show the error on disk.
partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/(disk ID)
(It will probably indicate that the GPT is located beyond the end of the disk.)
3. Wipe disk and rewrite with a basic MSDOS partion.
partedUtil setptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/(disk ID) msdos
(The output from this should be similar to msdos and the next line will be o o o o)
"Old" hardware:
VMware, I hate how depricate older hardware!!!! My homelab was running on HP ML350 G6's. They were upgraded from ESXi v6.7 to v7, inplace, not fresh installs. Six months goes by and I just now realize that my 1gbps NICs were not showing. Turns out that the Intel i350 NICs built into the HP are not supported by VMware after v6.7. There is a VERY, VERY long list of hardware Vmware just decided to turn their backs on, including three other different quad and dual port 1gbps NICs I had in my inventory.
I wasn't affected to badly as my server has 10gbps NICs in addtion to the 1gbps. I had a Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet in inventory that I was able to install and configure. It is a very good idea to look at the hardware compatibility list prior to doing upgrades. I found a list of depricaed hardware and edited it, here is the link (make note of the three tabs in this spreadsheet). The Intel i350 NICs (Dell Part Number 0k9cr1) also work
