I recently rebooted my vCenter server for maintenance reasons. However, when I went to access vCenter, I could not as vCenter would not start. The vpxd.log file contained:

Datastore with invalid folder

There was new firmware for my HP BladeSystem so I chose this week end to do the upgrade. Perhaps that was a mistake, but I was having connection issues to my Interconnects and reporting was not happening. I also thought it would help with my non-working small LCD screen. That was also not the case. So the saga begins innocuous enough, with a successful but odd upgrade of the OA, then onto virtual connect devices, and finally was going to end with the brocade switch upgrade, leaving the blades firmware to be upgraded next time.

There are two ways to solve the issues with dvSwitches I spoke about before. The first is to place vCenter onto an administrative per host vSwitch. The second is to create new dvSwitch portgroups but first ensure the portgroup is marked as ephemeral. But if you already have portgroups, how would you migrate from one portgroup to these ephemeral portgroups. In theory, ephemeral ports do not require vCenter to be active in order for a port assignment to take place. So how do you migrate from Static dvSwitch portgroups to Ephemeral dvSwitch portgroups?

I came back from EMCworld 2011 and found that my vCenter server had crashed while I was away. This is a fairly uncommon issue so how do you debug such things:

Attempt to restart the vCenter server
If that fails look at

Inside, this log if showed me the following message near the end:

“Transaction log for database ???? is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused….”

The other day, yesterday to be exact, I completed a long standing task of my vSphere Upgrade. Migrate my vCenter Server database from the vCenter Server to a dedicated MSSQL Server. I have always wanted to do this, but licensing and other issues always got in the way.

Since I adopted vSphere, I have been meaning to move to distribute virtual networking, but other things got in the way, such as my upgrade to a blade infrastructure as well as just general maintenance.Well I finally gave it a try. I have 4 basic networks, each for their own trust zone. 3 of these 4 migrated quickly and easily, but the last one was proving a bit difficult as it contained the service console of the vSphere ESX hosts as well as the administrative tools to manage the vSphere environment.