Troubleshooting on iThinkVirtual™

Fixing A Corrupt Domain Controller – Stop Code 0x00002e2

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 02:22:23 -0500

Yesterday morning I discovered that my Synology NAS had an unexpected shutdown in the middle of the night while my homelab VMs/workloads were still running. This caused both of my Domain Controllers databases to become corrupt resulting in being unable to boot those machines. When attempting to boot them, they would get stuck in a BSOD boot-loop and would display a Stop Error Code of 0x00002e2.

How To: Create A VMFS5 Datastore On A USB Drive

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 21:45:09 -0400

Create A VMFS5 Datastore On A USB Drive

Ever wondered if it was possible to use a USB Drive as a VMFS5 datastore in VMware vSphere 6.0? I sure know that I have! Not that I would like to run any VM’s on said datastore, as I’m sure performance would not be optimal, but instead to test its functionality and use it for storing ESXi host logs for example. Well, I ran into an issue today where I needed to unmount all of my NFS mounts on ESXi 6.0 U2 in order to recreate some of the volumes before remounting them. The problem was that I was unable to unmount one of my volumes because it was bound to the ESXi host for scratch logs. As I didn’t have a spare drive of any sort to attach to my host so that I could reconfigure the location for scratch logs, I began tinkering with the idea of using a small USB drive as a temporary datastore for these logs.

PernixData FVP Freedom Woes With Missing Supermicro System UUID

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 22:44:03 -0400

PernixData FVP Freedom Woes With Missing System UUID

Recently, I’ve been wanting to give PernixData FVP Freedom a run in my HomeLab Datacenter to better familiarize myself with the product and see how much of a performance improvement I’d get if any at all. I’ve heard from so many people how much they love the product so I figured “why not”?

Intel NIC not detected by ESXi

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 03:48:41 -0400

Intel NIC Not Detected by ESXi

In this post I am going to cover a random issue I encountered after installing ESXi 6.0 Update 2 on one of my new Home Lab 2016 hosts. The actual installation of ESXi was extremely easy and painless (I may cover that in another post). After I had completed the installation, I was attempting to configure my Management network interfaces and suddenly noticed that only 4 network interfaces were being detected!