Sam McGeown

In my previous post Backing up ESXi 5.5 host configurations with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) – Workflow design walkthrough I showed how to create a workflow to back up host configurations, but it was limited to one host at a time. For this post I’m going to show how to create a new workflow that calls the previous one on multiple hosts using a ForEach loop to run it against each one. This was actually easier than I had anticipated (having read posts on previous versions of vCO that involved created the loops manually).

As a little learning project, I thought I’d take on Simon’s previous post about backing up ESXi configurations and extend it to vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), and document how I go about building up a workflow. I’m learning more and more about vCO all the time, but I found it has a really steep entry point, and finding use cases is hard if you haven’t explored capabilities.

I’ve been playing about with a compact SRM install in my lab - since I have limited resources and only one site I wanted to create a run-through for anyone learning SRM to be able to do it in their own lab too. I am creating two sites on the same IP subnet (pretend it’s a stretched LAN across two sites) and will be protecting a single, tiny Linux web server using vSphere Replication. I’m aiming to cover SAN based replication in a later post.

I’m fairly new to SRM, but even so this one seemed like a real head-scratcher! If you happen to be using CA signed certificates on your “protected site” vCenter and “recovery site” vCenter servers, when you come to linking the two SRM sites you encounter SSLHandShake errors – basically SRM assumes you want to use certificates for authentication because you’re using signed certificates. If you use the default self-signed certificates, SRM will default to using password authentication (see SRM Authentication). Where the process fails is during the “configure connection” stage, if either one of your vCenter servers does not have CA signed and the other does (throws an error that they are using different authentication methods) or that you are using self-signed certificates for either SRM installation (throws an error that the certificate or CA could not be trusted).

This had me scratching my head, what seemed to be a common problem wasn’t fixed by the common solution. It was actually my fault – too familiar with the product and setting things up too quickly to test.

I installed a VCSA 5.5 instance in my lab as a secondary site for some testing and during the process found I couldn’t log on to the web client – it failed with the error:

After having a play with Virtual Flash and Host Caching on one of my lab hosts I wanted to re-use the SSD drive, but couldn’t seem to get vFlash to release the drive. I disabled flash usage on all VMs and disabled the Host Cache, then went to the Virtual Flash Resource Management page to click the “Remove All” button. That failed with errors:

“Host’s virtual flash resource is inaccessible.”

So this morning I took the VMware Infrastructure as a Service exam (VCPVCD510) to gain the VCP5-Cloud qualification. The IaaS exam is available for existing VCP5-DCV holders to take without any other pre-requisites. I am very pleased to say I finished the exam in good time and scored 466/500 – the pass mark is 300.

The Exam

The exam itself is 85 multiple choice questions, and gives you 90 minutes to do them. The last two exams I’ve sat were VCAPs, which require you to move very quickly through the questions, so I am in the habit of answering quickly: I finished with over an hour to spare! The questions and answers are not particularly wordy but it is important to read carefully and pick out the important information.

According to VMware, Infrastructure Navigator is

…a component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. It automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources.

Effectively it takes a look at the network connections that are running between your VMs (and physical servers) and works out which applications and services are running on each, and the dependencies – both upstream and downstream – for each VM.

There’s no doubt that vCOps is a great product for proactively monitoring your vSphere environment, but it’s a hefty package for the lab. The minimum recommended RAM is a whopping 16GB – in my lab that’s the whole of my management host! I recently needed to do some testing so I wanted to get it running in the lab with the barest minimum I could get working, and it turns out you can get working with just 4GB and 2 CPU…albeit you wouldn’t want to monitor much! I also want to use vFlash Read Cache to accelerate I/O in the lab – this requires upgrading VMtools and the VM hardware to version 10.

2013 has been an amazing year for me – I was awarded the vExpert title, I’ve taken and passed my VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD and spoken at the London and UK national VMUGs. I’ve attended my first VMworld and spent countless hours in the lab and on study, generating about 30 blog posts. All I can say is that it’s been a truly blessed year.

After two and a half years working as a Senior Infrastructure Analyst for a global insurance company, the time has come for a change! For a while now I’ve felt that I’ve outgrown my current role and that perhaps it was time for a change. I have worked with some really excellent people on my team while here, and I’ll definitely be sad to say goodbye to some of them! I’ve had the opportunity to work on some huge-scale environments and highly complex systems – all of which allowed me to learn and grow in ways not possible in a “normal” size environment.