I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page .

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page .

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

I will be upgrading

• vCenter Server Appliance - currently 5.5 update 1
• vSphere Update Manager - currently 5.5 update 1
• 3 HP N54L resource hosts
• 1 Intel NUC management host

In my lab I run various VMware software suites listed below, although I typically run them in nested environments to keep my lab install relatively clean.

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

Checking for driver compatibility

In vSphere 5.5, VMware dropped the drivers for quite a few consumer grade NICs - in 6 they’ve gone a step further and actually blocked quite a few of these using a VIB package. For more information, see this excellent article by Andreas Peetz.

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance

Download and mount the VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643 ISO image (mounted as G:\ on my workstation).

Browse the ISO and run the Client Integration Plugin “G:\vcsa\VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe” - it’s a simple next, next finish sort of install.

vRealize Log Insight 2.5 improves on the clustering in previous versions with an Integrated Load Balancer (ILB) which allows you to distribute load across your cluster of Log Insight instances without actually needing an external load balancer. The advantage of this over an external load balancer is that the source IP is maintained which allows for easier analysis.

The minimum number of nodes in a cluster is three, the first node becomes the Master node and the other two become Worker nodes. The maximum number of nodes supported is six, though acording to Mr Log Insight himself, Steve Flanders , the hard limit is more:

<img class=“alignright wp-image-5603 size-medium” src="/images/2015/02/cisco_SG300-20_1.png" alt=“Cisco SG300-20” width=“300” height=“180” of upgrading my lab switch, which is the excellent Cisco SG300-20, I’ve not had a chance to update the firmware since it was released 6 months ago because of the downtime. For some reason I prefer configuring the SG300 from the command line - a hangover from my old networking days I suppose, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me to use the GUI!

Recently, I’ve had a bit of a SOAP baptism of fire - the project I am working on makes hundreds of SOAP calls to multiple SOAP APIs on multiple hosts. During this time I’ve encountered some common and rare problems and troubleshooting them seems to be a bit of a black art, if the number of results in Google is any measure.

To demonstrate some of these troubleshooting methods I will use a global weather SOAP service, http://www.webservicex.com/globalweather.asmx?WSDL . I’ve added the web service to vRO using the “Add a SOAP host” workflow, and then used the “Generate a new workflow from a SOAP operation” workflow to create a new workflow: GetWeather. This simple workflow runs successfully:

Having been a VMUG member for several years and now a VMUG leader I have seen the value of being a VMUG member and attending the meetings/events/conferences continue to increase.

So why do I think you should you go?

If you are using VMware technologies/products in your workplace or you are regularly consulting on said VMware products, the VMUG events are in my opinion invaluable.

It simply doesn’t matter what experience/knowledge you have of the products, whether you are very new to virtualization or an old hand I  guarantee you will come away from any VMUG meeting having learned something useful or dare I say been a great source/help to others whom you have met and networked with.

When you are using a VMware orchestration platform with an official VMware plugin to manage a VMware product, you don’t really expect to have to fix the out-of-the-box workflows. However, during some testing of some workflows with a client the other day we ran into a couple of issues with the vCloud Director plugin workflows.

Software versions used

• vCloud Director 5.5.1 (appliance for development) and 5.5.2 (production deployment)
• vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 5.5.2.1
• vCloud Director plugin 5.5.1.2

CPU allocations are incorrect for both “Add a VDC”

When you provide the CPU allocation model properties for the Allocation Pool model the first problem is decrypting the naming - it doesn’t match the names in the vCloud Director interface!