Here’s a lesson in checking the basics! I added new ESXi 5 host to a cluster today and spent a good couple of hours troubleshooting the error:

vSphere HA agent for host [Host’s Name] has an error in [Cluster’s Name] in [Datacenter’s Name]: vSphere HA agent cannot be correctly installed or configured

After a few basic checks, migrating the host in and out of the cluster and rebooting, I headed off to google and began troubleshooting.

Just a quick post regarding the vSphere Management Assistant 5 - when deploying the vMA with a static IP address, you might see the following error:

Power On virtual machine  Cannot initialize property ’ vami.DNS0.vSphere_Man- agement_Assistant_(vMA)’ , since network ‘’ has no associated IP pool configuration.

Edit the vMA virtual machine’s properties and go to Options, vApp Options and select disable. Acknowledge the warning and click OK to close the VM properties.

If you are close to the VMware ESXi storage path limit of 1024 paths per host, you may want to consider the following: local storage, including CD-ROMs, are counted in your total paths.

Simply because of the size and age of the environment, some of our production clusters have now reached the limit (including local paths) - you see this message in the logs

[2012-08-20 01:48:52.256 77C3DB90 info ‘ha-eventmgr’] Event 2003 : The maximum number of supported paths of 1024 has been reached. Path vmhba3:C0:T4:L0 could not be added.

I’m currently updating a very small 4-host cluster built for a specific application within our datacentre, the hosts are IBM HS22 blades. Since we have the VMware Update Manager infrastructure in place already, I downloaded the IBM ESXi 5.0 Update 2 ISO and imported it into Update Manager, created a baseline and then applied it to the cluster. I scanned the cluster with the baseline and was issued this warning for each host:

This is my current scenario: there are two existing servers in a stand-alone array - TMG01 and TMG02, and over in a DR site there is a new server (TMG03) that is in the process of being built. To comply with DR, all 3 servers must have their configurations up to date, however there is no direct communication allowed between the two DMZs, so simply adding to the new server as an array member is not possible.

A couple of months ago I posted the first version of my SCOM 2007 R2 Daily Health Check Script - here is version 2. It’s more than a little motivated by some friendly competition with a Microsoft PFE for SCOM, hopefully you’ll agree it’s a big improvement on the last version.

Updated for this version

• Formatting changed to make it more readable and more compatible
• Added “Report generated on ” to the top of the report
• Management Server states reported as one section
• Default MP check moved to beneath the Management servers
• Agents in pending states moved to be with the Agent health states
• Clarified “Unresponsive Agents” and “Agents reporting errors”
• Management server alerts streamlined
• Added top 10 alerts for the last 7 days, and added top alerters for each

I’m planning to wrap in some SQL database size checks and some of the other recommendations later - I’ll post again here when that’s ready 🙂

This is every file server admin’s nightmare: hundreds of shares, thousands of folders, hundreds of thousands of files - and custom or not inherited rights on many of them. Terabytes of data that need auditing - e.g. to find customer data, or credit card information. How do you go about accessing all the data in all the trees? What about backups failing because someone removed the System account? Of course you can seize control of the folder by taking ownership and pushing down from a top level - but how do you preserve the existing Access Control Lists?

An updated version of this script has been released: https://www.definit.co.uk/2012/05/scom-2007-r2-daily-health-check-script-v2/

I’ve been working with a Microsft SCOM PFE (Premier Field Engineer) for the last few months and part of the engagement is an environment health check for the SCOM setup. Based on this Microsoft recommend a series of health checks to for the environment that should be carried out every day. This is summarised as the following:

1. Check the health of all Management Servers and Gateways
2. Check the RMS is not in maintenance mode
3. Review Outstanding Alerts
4. Review Agent’s Health Status
5. Review Backup Status
6. Review any Management Group Alerts
7. Review the Pending Management status
8. Review Database Sizes (Operations, Data warehouse, ACS)
9. Review Volume of Alerts
10. Review Alert Latency
11. Document any changes 

From this, there are certain aspects that can’t be automated so easily, or shouldn’t be - e.g:

This post is nothing more than a shameless request for sponsorship! As the title suggests, I am running the London marathon this year (in 96 days!) for the charity “The Lighthouse Group”. Check out the TLG site for more detail on what they do, but in a nutshell they are a charity that works with young people who have been excluded from school, at risk of exclusion or are at crisis point in their education. It’s a really worthwhile cause and my father-in-law has just been involved in opening a TLG center based in Normanton, Yorkshire

The Test MAPI Connectivity monitor for the Exchange 2007 management pack will automatically generate a critical error for any Recovery Storage Groups you have on monitored Exchange Mailbox Roles. As these are generally temporary Storage Groups created for a recovery and then removed, you don’t want an alert - but manually adding an override for every time is not a great use of your time either.

The State Change event details are as follows: