vSphere

Learning vSphere 6.5-Part-4-System Requirements for Installing vCenter Server

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we discussed about various deployment models available for deploying vCenter Server and PSC. In this post we will look into minimum system requirements  that must be met for installing windows based vcenter Server.

If you have missed earlier post of this series, you can read them from below links:

1: Installing and Configuring Esxi

2: VCSA Overview

3: vCenter Server and PSC Deployment Types

vCenter Server for Windows Requirements

To install vCenter Server on a windows, following hardware and software requirements must be met:

1: NTP ready environment : Clocks must be synchronized on the virtual machines where vCenter Server and PSC will be deployed. I previously wrote a blog on configuring Domain controller as NTP and you can read the article from here

2: Environment should be DNS Ready: Make sure you can successfully resolve hostnames of the servers. Also ensure Name to IP and IP to name resolution is happening fine for all the servers.… Read More

Learning vSphere 6.5-Part-3-vCenter Server and PSC Deployment Types

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we had an overview of VCSA and touched a little bit on what are the new features that are included in VCSA v6.5.

In this post we will discuss about available deployment models for vcenter Server and VCSA.

If you have missed earlier post of this series, you can read them from here:

1: Installing and Configuring Esxi

2: VCSA Overview

Windows based vCenter Server or VCSA can be deployed either with an embedded PSC or an external PSC. You can also deploy a PSC as an appliance or install it on Windows. Depending on your infrastructure needs, it can be mix and match of both.

Before proceeding with installation of vCenter Server Appliance or vCenter Server for Windows, you must determine the deployment model that is suitable for your environment. The deployment types can be categorised in mainly 3 categories:

vcsa-deployment

vCenter Server with an Embedded Platform Services Controller

This is a standalone deployment type that has its own vCenter Single Sign-On domain with a single site.… Read More

Learning vSphere 6.5-Part-2-VCSA Overview

Manish Jha

In first post of this series Installing and Configuring Esxi we looked into Installation of Esxi 6.5 and as I stated in that post installation method has not changed at all. In this post we will look into overview of VCSA and will discuss about VCSA components.

Staring with vSphere 6.0, vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) offers same scalability as provided by windows based vCenter Server installation. Earlier there was a limitation with vCSA that it cannot support huge infrastructure where you have a lot of Esxi hosts and virtual machines running. Same holds true for v6.5 as well.

Earlier in v6.0 there was a limitation that if you are planning to use VUM in your infrastructure, you have to install it on a windows server.

Lot of customers had provided the feedback to VMware to include VUM with linux based VCSA and VMware listened to them and now in v6.5 VUM can be used alongside VCSA on same node.… Read More

Learning vSphere 6.5-Part-1-Installing and Configuring Esxi

Manish Jha

We all know that vSphere 6.5 was announced by VMware 2 weeks back in VMworld Barcelona. With the release of 6.5 version of vSphere, VMware has done some fantastic work with HA and DRS enhancements. Several folks wrote blogs on the new features and enhancements that are included in this new release.

If you have not read about the new features/enhancements in vSphere 6.5, you can read it from here. Brian has done fantastic job by summing up all that you want to know about vSphere 6.5.

After reading a bit about vSphere 6.5, I decided to deploy and test it in my lab.

Note: The GA and beta version has not been released yet by VMware.

Let’s begin with part 1 of this series where we will see installation/configuration of Esxi host.

vSphere is a sophisticated product with multiple components to install and setup. Typically installing vSphere includes the following tasks:

1

 

We are starting with deploying Esxi host.… Read More

Replacing vSphere 6 Solution user certificates with CA signed certificates

Manish Jha

In our last post Replacing Esxi 6 SSL Certificates we learned how to replace Esxi host default certificates with CA signed certificates. In this post we will learn how to replace vSphere 6 solution user certificates with customer certificates signed by CA.

If you have missed earlier posts of this series, then you can read them from below links

1: Setup CA Server for vSphere Lab

2: Set Up Automatic Certificate Enrollment

3: Request Internal Certificate from CA Server

4: Everything You Should Know About Certificate Management in vSphere 6

5: Replacing vSphere 6 SSL Certificates

6: Replacing Esxi 6 SSL Certificates

Solution Users use SSL Certificates for internal communication and endpoint registration in vSphere 6. For vCenter with embedded PSC, there are four Solution User Certificates:

  • machine
  • vpxd
  • vpxd-extension
  • vsphere-webclient

We will be replacing certificates for all the solution user in this post.

Follow below steps to replace the solution user certificates:

1: Creating Certificate Signing Request

Launch the certificate manager utility

Press 5 to select “Replace solution user certificates with custom certificates”

Provide password of SSO account

Select option 1 “Generate Certificate signing Request(s) and key(s) for solution user certificates”

sol-1

Provide path to directory where you want to store the .csr… Read More

vRealize Log Insight: Part-2: Installation/Configuration

Manish Jha

In last post Log Insight Introduction of this series we had a look on what is vRealize Log Insight and where did it came from. What is the advantage of using it and how it fit together with other VMware components.

In this post we are going to see basic installation/configuration of the Log Insight appliance.

vRealize Log Insight is available in the form of OVA file and you can evaluate the product by registering and downloading it from here

You can choose to deploy the downloaded ova file as it is or can convert it to ovf file using ovftool. You can use the command shown in following example to do so:

PS C:UsersAdministrator> ovftool “C:UsersAdministratorDownloadsVMware-softOVA FilesLog-Insight-3.3.1.ova” “C:Us
ersAdministratorDownloadsVMware-softOVA FilesLog-Insight-3.3.1.ovf”

Output:

=======================================================
Opening OVA source: C:UsersAdministratorDownloadsVMware-softOVA FilesLog-Insight-3.3.1.ova
Opening OVF target: C:UsersAdministratorDownloadsVMware-softOVA FilesLog-Insight-3.3.1.ovf
Writing OVF package: C:UsersAdministratorDownloadsVMware-softOVA FilesLog-Insight-3.3.1.ovf
Transfer Completed
Warning:
– ExtraConfig option ‘keyboard.typematicmindelay’ is not allowed, will skip it.… Read More

vRealize Log Insight: Part-1: Introduction

Manish Jha

This week I decided to test my hands on the log management tool from VMware i.e vrealize Log Insight. We have this tool in our production environment and have to jump into analysis of Alerts received from this tool. Due to lack of knowledge troubleshooting sometime becomes very difficult so I decided to deploy this in my lab and play around options.

What is vRealize Log Insight?

vRealize Log Insight is a log management tool that aggregates logs from various systems into one place.The cool aspect of Log Insight is that it supports the collection of logs either from VMware infrastructure (i.e. ESXi hosts) either from physical infrastructure (i.e. physical servers, physical switches, etc.) either from application (i.e. virtual/physical machines guest operating systems).

With the introduction of vCenter Log Insight (Later renamed as vRealize Log Insight) VMware joined the already crowded log analytics market. There are several other products in market such as Splunk, LogRhythm, Sumo Logic and Loggly which are used for data center log consolidation and analysis.… Read More

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

Manish Jha

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.

1

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

Manish Jha

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.

vc-14

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

vcp-5

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:

vcp-1

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

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

Manish Jha

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

1

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