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Quick Tip: How to change the MAC address on a vSphere VM by editing the VMX file

Someone may know that a vSphere 8.0 Update 2 bug prevents you from setting a static MAC address for a VM (KB 95189).

The symptom is simple – you change the MAC address in the VM’s network interface settings, but after you click OK, nothing changes.

As a workaround, there is a solution – do the same using vSphere Host Client (ESXi Web interface). But in my case, this workaround doesn’t help, I’ve received an error:

Failed to reconfigure virtual machine pleasechangemymac. Invalid configuration for device '4'.

If you are in this situation and you need to change a VM MAC address, one good old hack still works – edit the VM’s VMX file.

Next – how to change the MAC address.

Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 1 – Native backup

vCenter server is a critical part of the VMware infrastructure stack, and most components and 3rd-party solutions depend on it. Although downtime of vCenter may not cause a problem with overall infrastructure and will not cause a VMs downtime, it will affect the provision of new resources, management, backups, and so on. So, keeping your vCenter up and running is a priority task in most cases.

In the few articles, we will look at how to backup and restore the vCenter server, if something goes wrong. There are a few strategies for protecting the vCenter server, but all of them depend on the required availability of the service. It can be backup, replication, vCenter HA functionality, or even deploying a new vCenter and connecting hosts manually.

We will look at two options – backup and restore vCenter using the native backup function and backup and restore vCenter using 3rd party backup software.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how to backup vCSA using native backup, available in VAMI.

Updating the VMware vCenter server from version 8.0 U1 to 8.0 U2 using the Reduced Downtime Upgrade procedure

With the announcement of vSphere 8.0 Update 2 a new interesting feature called vCenter Reduced Downtime Update (RDU) was introduced.

This feature can reduce overall vCenter Server downtime during updates and upgrades.

In a nutshell, RDU is a vLCM feature that creates a new already updated vCenter Server virtual machine and copies all data from running vCenter to the new copy. After data is copied, all we need to do is to switch over to the updated copy of vCenter. Switchover takes less time than the full upgrade procedure and minimizes the downtime of vCenter.

In this article, we will look at how to update the vCenter server from version 8.0 Update 1 to version 8.0 Update 2 using RDU.

Deploying Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 on VMware vSphere 8

This year Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 (CE 2.0) was released, based on Nutanix AOS 6.5 – the most actual LTS version at the time of writing.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how to deploy a three-node Nutanix CE 2.0 cluster on a VMware vSphere 8 infrastructure.

VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 2 is out

VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 2 is out with a number of interesting features. If you don’t know what’s new in this release you can start with What’s new article, released right after the announcement of U2.

Release notes for vCenter Server 8.0 Update 2 are here.

Release Notes for ESXi 8.0 Update 2 are here.

Please note, that at the time of writing this post, vCenter Server was released as GA (General Availability) and ESXi was released as IA (Initial Availability). You can read about the differences between GA and IA here.