LUN Zoning in Openfiler: Presenting a subset of Luns to Esxi hosts

I am currently working on Disaster Recovery  in my lab and as a result I have setup 2 sites: Primary and DR site. On both site I am having one vCenter and 2 Esxi hosts.

For centralized storage I am using openfiler v2.99 in my lab and I have created 2 LUN’s (100 GB each) on openfiler which are presented to Esxi hosts at my primary site.

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If you are new to openfiler then I would recommend reading this document which I uploaded on VMTN sometime back.

I was looking for a way to create 2 more LUN’s and expose those LUN’s only to Esxi hosts that are on my DR site. I did not wanted that all my Esxi host should have visibility to all LUN’s that are created on openfiler. In short I was looking for LUN Zoning kind of things with openfiler in my home lab.

I have never done this and did not had much Idea on how to achieve that.… Read More

Problem Installing vCenter Server 6: The user associated with the DSN has insufficient privileges

Today while working in my lab I was facing one issue when I was trying to install vCenter Server on top of Server 2012. I was experimenting to deploy vCenter Server with external SQL 2014 database. This was my first experience with working on external database for vCenter Server and I knew I am gonna face some issues.

I created vCenter Server database on my SQL Server and tested connection from vCenter Server to database (ping, telnet etc) and all went fine. I setup 64 bit DSN on my vCenter Server to connect to the SQL Server and that too went fine and I was very relaxed that most difficult part is already over.

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This is when my happiness was blown away by error as described below.

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On database settings page when I choose next I was getting error “The user associated with the DSN has insufficient privileges“. This is shown below:

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I was not aware of this issue so I started googling and immediately found the solution.… Read More

vSphere Replication-Part 5: Replicating and Recovering VM’s using VR

In last post of this series we saw how to deploy vSphere Replication appliance. In this appliance we will see the basic configurations of the replication appliance and will replicate a VM from source site to DR site. Also we will see how to recover VM on target (DR) site when your primary site has gone down.

If you have missed earlier posts of this series then you can access the same by clicking on below links:

1:Introduction to vSphere Replication

2: Lab Setup

3: Preparing vCenter for Replication

4: Deploying vSphere Replication Appliance

Let’s jump into lab and see things into action.

1: Configure vSphere Replication Appliance

a: To start configuring vSphere Replication appliance, login to the VAMI console of the appliance. This is typically accessible over URL https://VRA_FQDN:5480

Login to appliance with user root and password set during deploying vSphere Replication appliance.

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b: Review your Network configuration by clicking on Network tab.… Read More

Deprecated VMFS volume(s) found on the host. Please consider upgrading volume(s) to the latest version

Today while working in my Lab I was seeing following warning message on my Esxi host:
Deprecated VMFS volume(s) found on the host. Please consider upgrading volume(s) to the latest version

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This error occurred just after I added a new shared LUN from my openfiler appliance.

If you SSH to Esxi host you will see error similar to as shown below in the /var/log/hostd.log file

Read More