Last week I was facing a serious issue in my home lab where my esxi host is getting disconnected from my vCenter Server randomly. Whenever I am doing any configuration changes like enabling ssh or creating a new vSwitch the host got disconnected immediately. I was damn frustrated and was looking for a solution because it was very hard for me to work.
So I started troubleshooting by going through my vCenter log files and found following:
With vSphere 6.0 Vmware has enhanced so many features and host profile is one of them. Let’s refresh what host profile do. A plain simple definition of host profile is:
“Host Profiles allow you to configure standard configurations for your ESXi hosts and to automate compliance to these configurations, simplifying operational management of large-scale environments and reducing errors caused by misconfigurations”
Two main features that are enhanced in vSphere v6.0 are:
Till release of vSphere 5.5 host profile required hosts to be put in maintenance mode before you can apply the profile. This can be a very inconvenient task when you are trying to change some configuration during normal business hours specially when the Host:VM consolidation ratio is high.
With vSphere 6.0 Vmware has made host profiles a bit intelligent. Now a host profile will require a host to be put into maintenance mode only if the configuration settings defined in host profile requires it.… Read More
Today I was reading one of the Duncan Epping’s blog and found one useful info related to HA so thought of sharing with you all.
We all are aware of DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules and we know the fact that HA doesn’t respect the VM-Host should rules and if any host fails then HA can restart the VM’s anywhere and not necessarily on the host to which VM’s has affinity rules tied up.
However on next invocation of DRS (default 5 minutes) this violation would be corrected by DRS itself and VM’s will return to the host according to the VM-Host affinity rules.
With vSphere 6.0 VMware has introduced one new advanced configurable option in HA. This setting is called “das.respectVmHostSoftAffinityRules”.
As the name itself suggests, this setting will let HA to respect VM-Host affinity rules when it can and can violate it when HA doesn’t have much choice.… Read More
Today I was looking for some tricks to tweak vCenter server 5.5 for my home lab as I have only 8 GB RAM available and my lab was damn slow. Below is my lab configuration
vCenter Server v5.5 (with embedded MS SQL Server) – Installed on Server 2008 R2 SP1 OS (Physical)
2 Esxi Server v5.5 – 2.5 GB RAM each (Virtual)
Domain Controller + DNS (server 2003) – 512 MB RAM (Virtual)
Openfiler – 768 MB RAM (Virtual)
After powering on all the VM’s which are running inside vmware workstation (installed on my server 2008) my LAB has become too slow and memory utilization was shooting upto 7.8 GB.
It was nearly impossible to work anything from GUI (VI Client + Web Client) as my Esxi hosts were getting disconnected from VC time and again whenever I was doing any configuration (addition or modification) due to the SQL timeout and I was relying on just command line.… Read More
What is Content Library?
One of the new feature of vSphere 6 is Content Library . The Content Library provides simple and effective management for VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts for vSphere Administrators collectively called “content”.
Sometimes we have ISO and other files (needed for VM creation etc) are spread across datastores as multiple administrators are managing vSphere Infrastructure.This can lead to duplication of the contents. To mitigate this issue concept of content library is introduced in vSphere 6.o which allows for a centralized place for storing your contents.
Advantage of Content Library
The Content Library can be synchronized across sites and vCenter Servers. Sharing consistent templates and files across multiple vCenter Servers in same or different locations brings out consistency, compliance, efficiency and automation in deploying workloads at scale.
Following are some of the features of the content library:
Every year vExperts are chosen all round the world for their contribution towards the VMware community and for their efforts VMware offers the vExperts access to community (private forum, access to beta products etc.)
Besides the public recognition of being a vExpert, they get additional benefits like free subscriptions, NFR licenses and so on from 3rd party vendors. However the information given below is available on the vExpert Community Page but still I am sharing this so that if anyone has missed it, they can checkout the benefits for year 2015 from here.
Vendor vExpert freebies
| Vendor (Software/Goodie) | Category? | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Pluralsight (Free subscription for one year) | Learning | Free training for MVPs and vExperts |
| Login VSI | Software license | VIP Program – Login VSI |
| Starwind | Software license | Free NFR License V8 |
| Veeam | Software license | FREE NFR LICENCE FOR Veeam Management Suite for VMware and Hyper-V |
| Datacore | Software license | http://pages.datacore.com/Free_NFR_Software.html |
| Solarwinds | Software license | Virtualization Manager NFR |
| Symantec | Software license | Free Backup Exec 2014 V-Ray Edition with Support |
| Royal TS/X | Software license | Royal TS/X NFR License |
| Proximal Data | Software license | vExperts Give Us a Try |
| Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager | Software license | Send an email to mtrottier@devolutions.net |
In our last posts of this series we learnt :
Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup
Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service
Now its time to upgrade the web client. Before starting the upgrade process lets discuss the basics about vSphere Web Client
The vSphere Web Client allows you to connect to a vCenter server to manage your vSphere environment through a web browser. Web Client make its entry with version 5.0 but with limited functionality. With further release of vSphere versions Web Client was optimized a lot and now a days VMware is pushing hard to use vSphere web client instead of windows based VI client.
All the new features of vSphere 5.5 can only be performed using vSphere web client and it will not be available in the traditional windows client. In the future release of vSphere version VMware can totally take out the regular C# VI Client and the only choice left will be using Web Client to manage the Virtual Infrastructure.… Read More
In our last few posts we have walkthrough the process of
Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup
Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service
Now its time to upgrade the vCenter Server. So lets start
Steps:
1: Launch the autorun.exe file from the installation directory and select vCenter Server and hit Install.
2: Select the installer language and hit OK.
3: Installer will detect previous version of vCenter Server already installed and warn you that it will be upgraded to version 5.5. Ignore the warning and hit Next.
4: Accept the License Agreement and hit Next.
5: You can provide the installation key during upgrade or else after Upgradation is complete.
6: If you did not supplied any key it will warn you that license key for previous version is no longer valid. Ignore the warning and click Next.
7: If you have chosed to use Windows Authentication during DSN setup it will take the credentials of currently login user and you can hit Next or else you have to specify DB username and password for your vCenter DB.… Read More
In our last post we learnt
Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup
In this post we will focus on upgrading vCenter Inventory Service.
Before start upgrading the Inventory Service lets discuss some basics about what actually is the Inventory Service.
Inventory Service reduces direct client requests to the vCenter server with query caching, reducing the load on core vCenter Server processes. Generally only 10% of traffic to a vCenter Server consists of writes and most of the requests (90%) are read requests. So if we can cache those reads so that we don’t have to ask vCenter to retrieve from its database each time, we can see a significant improvement in response times; while also reducing the load on the more critical vCenter Server itself.
Inventory service stores vCenter server application and inventory data which enable us to search and access objects across linked vCenter Server systems. The main use case of the Inventory Service is to manage the vSphere Web Client inventory objects and property queries that the client requests when users navigate the vSphere environment.… Read More
In previous post we have gone through some of the basic considerations which should be kept in mind before starting the upgrade process and also we learnt Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup
In this post we will start with upgrading the vCenter SSO
Before starting upgrading the Single Sign On lets discuss a bit about what has been changed in version 5.5.
SSO architecture has been restructured from the scratch in version 5.5. The new SSO architecture is based on a multi-master model where each instance is automatically kept up to date with it peers via built-in replication. You can create sites to provide logical groupings of registered resources that maybe geographical or organizational separate as well as support for multiple tenants.
Below are some of the key improvements and changes that are made in the vCenter Single Sign-on 5.5 as compared to previous versions: