Wu's Blog

You may need to access the internet with a VPN for privacy or performance. The most popular VPN solution is Shadowsocks . If you are an IT Pro, you may face a similar issue that I'm facing: How does VM share host VPN connection? My home lab is running on top of VMware Workstation on a Windows 10 computer. The virtual machines use the NAT network to communicate outside. It goes over the internet through my ISP directly. The performance of AWS or Azure is slow. I tried Shadowsocks on the Windows 10 computer. The performance is good. But Shadowsocks is not like other VPN solutions. Its only functions for the host computer (The Windows 10 computer). I had to run Shadowsocks client on each virtual machine to get the better speed. I read an article that is talking about how to share host VPN with VirtualBox. It gave me some ideas. The solution is actully similar: Make sure the " Allow Clients from LAN " option is checked in the Shadowsocks client. Find out the IP address of

It’s useful to get email notification when there is an alarm raised in vCenter Server. To configure the function. You need a valid SMTP server. And configure the SMTP server on vCenter Server. If there is a problem that vCenter Server is not sending email alerts. We need to isolate is it a vCenter Server side issue, or an SMTP server problem. Therefore how to identify problem source is important. VMware moved vCenter Server to a customized Linux based platform since 5.5. It’s easy for administration, but limited ability in troubleshooting. You may notice that the telnet command is not available when troubleshooting the SMTP issue. The following is how to troubleshoot such an issue on the vCenter Server virtual appliance. Firstly, you need to ping the IP address and FQDN of the SMTP server. Make sure the basic connectivity between the vCenter Server and SMTP server is working. Second, try to reach out to SMTP service on the vCenter Server to make sure the SMTP protocol can be establish

Azure Migrate appliance is a simple tool to move VMware virtual machines to Azure. But it has limitation to migrate VMs on multiple vCenter servers. In other words, you have to deploy multiple appliances to support multi-vCenter. This is a time-consuming task. In fact, there is a way to reset the Azure Migrate Appliance. There is a file appliance.json in Azure Migrate appliance. It stores the key information of the Azure Migrate project. The credentials, vCenter server, and key vault information are all stored in the file. Also the registration status. The file is located in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Azure\Config\ . It's a JSON file. The variable IsApplianceRegistered indicates if the appliance registered or not. Change the value from True to False will reset Azure Migrate appliance status. Of course, you still need to reboot the appliance. This reset is no impact to stored credential and vCenter server data.