Setting timezone in Photon-OS

Many of VMware’s appliances are based on Photon OS. Sometimes these appliances aren’t using suitable timezones for your current location, which makes it difficult to match logs and results.

If that appliance has no GUI, you have to adjust it on the shell. Use SSH or the appliance’s console to login as ‘root’. To get a list of all available timezones issue the command below.

ls -lsa /usr/share/zoneinfo | more

Some timezones are divided into sub-zones. For example “Europe”.

ls -lsa /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe | more

We’re piping the results to the ‘more‘ command in order to achieve better readability. It’s optional. Once you’ve found your timezone, you can set it. In my example it’s “Europe/Berlin”.

Set Europe/Berlin timezone

Next we’ll create a symbolic link from localtime to “Europe/Berlin”.

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime

Finally we can check settings with the ‘date’ command. Date and Time is correct and also the timezone CEST.

Kubernetes Academy goes live

There’s a new learning portal about containers and Kubernetes. VMware has launched https://kubernetes.academy to share knowledge around the container ecosphere. It is meant for newcomers and advanced learners.

Registration is free. VMware wants to spread the word about containes and container orchestration to the community in order to gain momentum for these future technologies.

If you’re unsure which tutorial to watch, there’s a short assessment quiz that will offer you a personalized course recommendation.

Read HBA Driver and Firmware Version

Before upgrading an ESXi host, it is best practice to to look at VMware HCL and check compatibility of host and IO devices. The combination of driver version, firmware version and ESXi release is crucial for compatibility. Even minor updates might lead to loss of HCL compatibility. A system that used to be HCL compliant at time of deployment, might no longer be compatible after e.g. the third ESXi update release. Updates can bring new driver versions which in turn might require higher firmware versions.

If you’re lucky you may have a software solution that keeps track of all your firmware and driver versions. Runecast Analyzer for example does a pretty good job and shows you current compatibility issues with a single click. Furthermore you can simulate updates/upgrades to any higher vSphere version and the resulting HCL status.

Unfortunately many customers do not have a software solution like that. In these cases you need to go back to the roots (literally) and gather all information on the ESXi shell. To do so you need to enable SSH service on all hosts you want to verify. That can be done in the vSphere-Client or more elegant and faster by a PowerCLI command.

Continue reading “Read HBA Driver and Firmware Version”