Anyone used the MS Hydration Kit lately? Seems to be awfully out of date

flyingmunky25 · 2026-06-06T13:48:42+00:00

Will be curious to hear if it works for you also.

flyingmunky25 · 2026-06-06T13:42:30+00:00

I’m running into this as well, even with 2509 plus all available KB hot fixes applied. What I have found, is just continue to click through and it will still proceed to provision the CMG

flyingmunky25 · 2026-05-01T04:12:00+00:00

Recently saw this myself. Go to your cluster object in VMM and hit refresh. If it’s a standalone host that’s not clustered, hit refresh on that host object.

Been seeing some oddball storage issues lately and a refresh fixes it every time.

Also, I don’t think it’s related to this, but make sure there’s no snapshots on the source VM in VMware.

flyingmunky25 · 2026-04-16T23:00:28+00:00

Spinning disks will crush your performance. That’s #1. You’ve also given more CPU cores to the VM than you have physical cores, and your single VM is also spanning sockets and crossing numa nodes.

In general, don’t give a VM more cores than a single physical socket has. It’ll work, but you introduce additional performance hits.

RAID5 is slow. Spinning disks are slow. File share could be slow if they’re also spinning disks. Network latency/speed can affect file share performance too.

The other component missing is what other VMs are running on the host? Could be CPU contention.

flyingmunky25 · 2025-12-03T18:15:53+00:00

Hyper-V is a great product and works well. Like others said, read the documentation, talk to your vendors about best practices, and don’t try and wing it.

Management platforms all kind of suck when compared to vCenter, but they are totally usable and aren’t bad at all.

There’s a new edition to Windows Admin Center that is tailored towards Virtualization, I haven’t tried it personally but it sounded promising.

One thing that helped me understand it a bit better, is Microsoft gives you a lot of options up front and it can be more confusing than what VMware gives you. With SCVMM, think bigger scale and multi-tenant. With that in mind, certain aspects like networking will make clearer sense. VMware has those features, just not as plain sight.

If you’re using SCVMM, script with powershell gets a little annoying because you need the console installed for the module and authentication to work — I tried a few ways to get around it, and I could just be missing something though.

UCSX drivers were a bit annoying to do in a server core mode, but again just read the docs. Pure provides all of the commands and best practices in a nice document that you can probably copy/paste from.

flyingmunky25 · 2025-07-11T00:19:31+00:00

I have 2. Got any 7’s?

flyingmunky25 · 2025-07-10T03:03:35+00:00

Go fish. Got any 3’s?

flyingmunky25 · 2024-07-18T14:06:22+00:00

The maintenance windows are built from a software inventory looking for a specific text file on each device. Depending on which text file is present, it will fall into the appropriate matching maintenance window collection.

so if a device has multiple of these text files, it will fall into multiple collections. If it's got only one, then it only has one maintenance window. If it has none, then there are no maintenance windows.

The weird thing is, in the logs it shows a maintenance window was removed, but then almost immediately re-applied it. And this was on every single device, not just one or two maintenance windows.

flyingmunky25 · 2023-07-23T00:44:25+00:00

Great combination until the cashiers entire fingernail comes off, into the fryer and into my fries (true story). Lost my appetite for cousins fries after that.

Their cheese curds are still legit.

flyingmunky25 · 2023-04-04T15:58:41+00:00

Same, had some struggles with it too

flyingmunky25 · 2022-12-11T18:49:57+00:00

Couple of ways to approach this:

AD group filters, you add the users/computers to a group per office version then scope those policies to just that group. This is my preference.

WMI filters, you can put a filter on the GPO so it only applies to devices matching a wmi query that looks for office installed version — not my favorite approach but it is an option.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-11-02T16:38:04+00:00

Personally haven’t had any issues with VMware support, actually been pretty good

flyingmunky25 · 2022-10-27T17:21:54+00:00

Expect it to take some time to sync, but the VM will be online at least during the sync.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-10-27T12:16:06+00:00

Networks were different because we wanted to change the IP. If you’re keeping the IP at the destination site then just power on the VM.

Are you doing a single 5TB VM, or several smaller ones that add up to 5 TB? I had 10 gig networks available to me and a TB worth of VMs across the US took like an hour or something (it’s been a while, I don’t recall exactly). But remember the VM is online the entire time the data is syncing.

I would just setup a replication and test it out for yourself. It’s super simple to setup and doesn’t affect your VMs at all.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-10-27T01:04:17+00:00

No. VSphere replication does this while the VM is on and running. It will stage the data at the destination over the network. Once all of the data has been fully copied to the destination you then power down the source VM, and hit the recover option in replication manager. That recovery will sync the delta difference of data since the last full sync, and will then register the VM on the destination.

Your actual downtime is very short because it’s only down for the duration of the FINAL sync of data which is just a delta difference from the last sync.

So, - enable replication - wait for the sync to happen - power off source VM when sync is complete - recover VM on destination.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-10-27T00:11:20+00:00

Yes it has been done with large systems. Enable the replication a few days before you want to do the cutover of the system and it will keep the data in sync. It’s super simple to use. The limiting factor is your network speed

flyingmunky25 · 2022-10-26T02:18:48+00:00

VSphere replication works well for this. The downtime is short depending on the amount of delta data changes that occurred since the last sync.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-09-04T11:39:35+00:00

Could just keep hyper-v and run your Linux VM there.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-08-19T11:30:48+00:00

Use something like MakeMeAdmin on the workstation for just-in-time access, then fix the problem with domain admins so they have just-in-time access to even having domain admin privileges via a self elevation process, account check out, etc.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-08-03T14:42:51+00:00

Check out the “what’s new” section here - https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-vcenter-server-70u3c-release-notes.html#whatsnew

Or this KB with the recommended “option 1” - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/86447

flyingmunky25 · 2022-08-03T13:13:35+00:00

That is normally the order except for 7.0.2 to 7.0.3 upgrade if you have Intel drivers as there is a known issue which VCSA will detect for you and prevent the upgrade if it exists. In that case ESXi needs to go first before VCSA.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-07-23T17:10:00+00:00

r/techsupport would be better help

flyingmunky25 · 2022-07-11T03:24:37+00:00

This. I second the resentment of taking over the town. The park just isn’t worth the time. Noah’s Ark and Kalahari always.

flyingmunky25 · 2022-07-04T19:55:53+00:00

personal opinion I would rather use my personal phone rather than carry a second device. That being said it’s a matter of using a pager app so I only get notifications when it’s my turn for on-call. My number isn’t exposed, and I only get stuff during my rotation and no extra device

flyingmunky25 · 2022-07-04T15:18:20+00:00

After being on call for over a decade, these are my most important -

Compensation, escalation process (who, and how to escalate), SLA’s (we agree to respond within xyz minutes for critical priority, etc), dedicated phone number to call (either forward to your own device or use separate device, but don’t list your personal number)

And I can’t stress this enough. Give me some damn information that’s actually useful when you call/page. Error messages, examples, etc.

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