Enable SNMP in ESXi 6.5 via SSH

I was trying to enable SNMP on a few stand-alone ESXi 6.5 hosts the other day. Unfortunately, when attempting to enable this service using the vSphere Host Client, I received a very unhelpful error:

 



I wasn't able to find any helpful information in the logs that could help identify the cause. Interestingly enough, enabling the service through SSH worked. Here's how I did it. First, you'll need to connect to your host via SSH (you will need to enable the SSH daemon first).

Once connected, type in "esxcli system snmp get" to see the current snmp configuration.



To enable SNMP, we first need to configure the community strings. To do that, type in "esxcli system snmp get --communities=<community strings>". Then, enable the service by typing in "esxcli snmp set --enable=true".

You can then verify the new configure by typing in "esxcli system snmp get" again.



Now refresh the vSphere Host Client, and the service should be running.

Auditing Exchange Online Transport Rule Use

I recently came across a transport rule being unnecessarily used in Exchange Online. The transport rule in question was used for DLP, and encrypted messages based on the content. It searched message bodies for strings of characters matching credit card numbers, SSN's, etc.  I was surprised to see that there was no way to easily audit transport rule usage with Powershell, so I checked the Exchange Control Panel. There is an option for auditing in each of the transport rules:



So, what does this checkbox actually do?

Enabling this checkbox will cause this rule to appear in Message Trace logs when it is applied to a message. 

Let's look at an example:

Here we have a transport rule in Exchange Online that appends "Outbound" to the subject line of all messages sent to external recipients:



 

After sending a message to an external recipient, we can see the rule working:



Let's take a look at the message trace:



We can see two entries in the message trace log. The first is for applying the transport rule, and the second entry is for setting the audit severity level. I haven't found a good explanation of the audit severity levels, other than you can filter by them when doing a message trace.

If you know of any other use for the audit severity levels, leave a comment below!

vSphere - Unable to Apply DRS Resource Setting on Host

I noticed this error on one of my hosts today. After reading the full error message on the Events tab, and paying particular attention to the "Error Stack" section, it was obvious what the problem was.



"The configuration file of the virtual machine is corrupted". Well, that helps narrow things down, but what virtual machine is it?

After clicking on the host and going to the Related Objects -> Virtual Machines tab, the problem became even more clear.



This was a replica that we deleted last weekend. For whatever reason, vCenter didn't de-register it from the database when it was deleted. The VM no longer existed on the host. To fix the issue, just right click on the VM and click "Remove from Inventory".

After doing this DRS became healthy and all alarms were silenced. I hope this helps anyone experiencing this or a similar problem.

-Ryan