Upgrading vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5- Part 4 Upgrading Inventory Service

Manish Jha

In our last post we learnt

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

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

Upgrading vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5- Part 3 Upgrading SSO

Manish Jha

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:

  1. Dependency on the external Database has been removed
  2. Single Sign-on is now supports multi-master Model and it will be aware about sites.
… Read More

Upgrading vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5- Part 2 Database and SSL Certificates Backup

Manish Jha

Before proceeding with upgrading vCenter 5.1 to vCenter 5.5, taking backup of the VC database and SSL certificates are very important so that if anything goes wrong we can revert back to original configuration anytime.

Database backup can be taken by you yourself or by your DB admin depending upon the type of environment where you are working. Generally in big corporates there are separate team which do all the DB activities, however, as a vSphere Admin you should know how to do basic DB activities. Backing up DB is very simple and straight forward task. I will walk through all the steps in this post to make it easier and simple to understand. So let’s start!!!

Before proceeding with taking backup we need to identify the SQL server name and Database Instance Name of your vCenter server database.

How to find out DB instance name

RDP to the server where your vCenter DB is installed and go to Start > Administrative Tools > Data Sources (ODBC) connections and launch ODBC Data Source Administrator.… Read More

Upgrading vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5- Part 1 Basics

Manish Jha

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my home lab from vSphere 5.1 version to vSphere 5.5 as part of my VCAP preparation (as VCAP 510 exam is no longer valid) and I decided to write a post on that so that it can be helpful for others as well.

The upgrade process is not much complex but you have to take certain considerations in mind before starting the upgrade process. With vSphere 5.5 VMware has done many changes and your environment should have that kind hardware/software which can support version 5.5.

We will be covering the upgrade process in following 5 steps

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service

Upgrading vCenter Server

Upgrading vSphere Web Client

Before starting the upgrade lets look at the important considerations

1: Upgrade Considerations

There are 2 upgrades methods available:

Simple Install upgrade
The Simple Install upgrade will upgrade all the vCenter components (SSO + Inventory Service + vCenter Server + Web Client) on a single machine like a simple install will install all components on a single machine.… Read More

Understanding NIC Teaming and Load Balancing Policies in virtual switch

Manish Jha

NIC Teaming

In its simplest terms NIC teaming means that we are taking multiple physical NICs on a given ESXi host and combining them into a single logical link that provides bandwidth aggregation and redundancy to a vSwitch. NIC teaming can be used to distribute load among the available uplinks of the team.  A NIC teaming configuration can look like as shown in below screenshot:

9780133511086 1.16.2014

There are several Load Balancing policies available for the virtual switch. These are discussed as below:

1: Route Based on Originating virtual Port-ID: This is the default load balancing policy for a vSS or vDS. This policy doesn’t require any special configuration to be done at virtual switch level or physical switch level.

In this policy when a NIC is added to a VM or a new VM is provisioned with a NIC and comes online, VMkernel assigns a Port-ID to the virtual NIC of the VM.… Read More

VLAN tagging in VMware vSphere

Manish Jha

Introduction

In a physical environment all the servers have dedicated physical NIC that are connected to a physical switch. VLANs in physical world are usually controlled by setting the VLAN ID on the physical switch port and then setting the server’s IP address to correspond to that NIC’s VLAN.

But in a virtual environment, dedicating a physical NIC (pNIC) to each VM that resides on the host is not possible. In reality, a physical NIC of the Esxi host service many VMs, and these VM’s may need to be connected to different VLANs. So the method of setting a VLAN ID on the physical switch port doesn’t work.

To counter this issue, 802.1Q VLAN tagging comes in picture in virtual environment.

Before digging deep into 802.1Q VLAN tagging lets understand how networking works in a virtual environment.

An Esxi host typically can have more than one physical network adapters for redundancy, load balancing and segregation.… Read More

Advanced Configuration options for VMware HA

Manish Jha

In this post I am going to cover a few advance settings in HA which you can be used in deploying complex HA solutions. You may or may not be using these advance value in your environment but sometimes you have to use these values depending upon how your virtualization infrastructure is laid.

1: das.isolationaddress: – By default the IP address used to check host isolation is the default gateway of the VMkernel port on the host. You can add more IP addresses for the host to use during an isolation check. A total of 10 addresses can be used (0-9).

For setting up this value Select Cluster > Edit Settings > vSphere HA > Advanced Options

HA1

HA-2

2: das.usedefaultisolationaddress:– this option has 2 values: True or False. When set to false a host will NOT use the default gateway as an isolation address. This may be useful when the default gateway of your host is an unpingable address, or a virtual machine, such as a virtual firewall

HA-3

3: das.isolationShutdownTimeout… Read More

VMware vSphere 6.0 — What’s New?

Manish Jha

vSphere 6.0 public beta has been released several months ago and in 2014 VMworld conference some of the new features have been announced. Due to NDA all the features were not disclosed. 

Multi-CPU Fault Tolerance

FT is going to support VM’s with 4 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM. A new feature called fast checkpointing uses a  mechanism to keep primary and secondary VMs in sync. The Record/Replay technology that was previously used is replaced by  Fast checkpointing in vSphere 6.0

 vMotion Enhancements
Earlier upto vSphere 5.5, vMotion was limited to the vCenter/Datacenter boundary but now in vSphere 6.0 vMotion can migrate Virtual Machines across vCenters, virtual switches and routed networks.

Virtual Datacenters
vSphere 6.0 goes one step further than resource Pools. A Virtual Datacenter aggregates CPU, Memory, Storage and Network resources.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

The VCSA has also been beefed up. With 5.1 you could manage 100 hosts and 3000 powered on VMs.… Read More

Replace Esxi host default certificate with CA-Signed Certificate

Manish Jha

A default certificate is generated automatically for the ESXi host during installation. Because the certificate for the ESXi host was self-generated, it has not been signed and will not be given a trusted status when attempting to communicate with other servers and clients. Other network devices might not allow communication with the ESXi host until it is certified by a well-known CA. X.509 certificates are supported over SSL connections for the encrypted session.

NOTE: When replacing the default certificate of the ESXi host, if the vCenter Server stops managing the host, check whether the ESXi host has Verify Certificates enabled. If this is the case, reconnect the ESXi host to the vCenter Server using the vSphere Client.

The steps to add a CA-signed certificate are as follows:

Step 1. Log in to the ESXi host over SSH using Putty.

Step 2. Change the directories to /etc/vmware/ssl, and backup the certificate files:

# mv rui.crt… Read More

Generate ESXi Host Certificates

Manish Jha

VMware use standard X.509 version 3 certificates to encrypt session information sent over Secure Socket Layer protocol connections between the client and the server.

If you want to replace default certificates for vCenter Server and ESXi , the certificates you obtain for your servers must be signed and must conform to the Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) key format. The key used to sign certificates must be a standard RSA key with an encryption length that ranges from 512 to 4,096 bits. The recommended length is 2,048 bits.

Certificates signed by a commercial certificate authority, such as Entrust or VeriSign, are pre-trusted on the Windows operating system. However, if you replace a certificate with one signed by your own local root CA, or if you plan to continue using a default certificate, you must pre-trust the certificate by importing it into the local certificate store for each vSphere Client instance.

Certificate files located on an ESXi host are

  • Private key file: /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.key
… Read More