VSphere

As a vExpert, I am blessed to get 1000 CPU hours access to Ravello’s awesome platform and recently I’ve been playing with the AutoLab deployments tailored for Ravello.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ravello’s offering (where have you been?!) then it’s basically a custom hypervisor (HVX) running on either AWS or Google Cloud that allows you to run nested environments on those platforms. I did say it’s awesome.

Providing a highly available single sign on for vRealize Automation is a fundamental part of ensuring the availability of the platform. Traditionally, (vCAC) vRA uses the Identity Appliance and relies on vSphere HA to provide the availability of the SSO platform, but in a fully distributed HA environment that’s not really good enough. It’s also possible to use the vSphere 5.5 SSO install in a HA configuration - however, many companies are making the move to the latest version of vSphere and don’t necessarily want to maintain a 5.5 HA SSO instance.

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.

Recently I encountered this problem in a customer site whereby the logon to VCSA 5.5 would either time out, or take 3-5 minutes to actually log on.

Running a netstat on the VCSA during the attempt to logon showed there was a SYN packet sent to the vCOps appliance on port 443 that never established a connection. Another check was attempting to connect using curl <https://> –k  - this would time out.

I was recently sent a copy of Christian Mohn’s new book “Learning Veeam Backup and Replication for VMware vSphere” to review, and as ever this is my honest opinion of this book. I am not receiving anything other than the copy of the book for this review. I don’t work for a vendor, so I have no axe to grind!

Content

The book starts of with explanations of basic backup strategies and explains principals like Grandfather-Father-Son media rotation and RPO/RTOs. From there it dives into the architecture of Veeam BR and its components. The remainder of chapter 1 covers a walk through of the installation of the product.

I recently got my hands on a copy* of Chris Wahl and Steve Pantol’s Networking for VMware Administrators and was very keen to read it – especially given the reputation of the authors. I came to the book as someone who is at CCNA level (although now expired) and someone who regularly designs complex VMware networks using standard and distributed switches. I would class myself as having a fairly decent understanding of networking, though not a networking specialist.

One of the things that never fails to amaze me are the superb PDF diagrams I occasionally stumble upon so i thought it would be a useful idea to list some of the the ones I have found on my travels.

vSphere 6 ESXTOP quick Overview for Troubleshooting

http://www.running-system.com/images/2015/04/ESXTOP_vSphere6.pdf

VMware vSphere 5 Memory Management and Monitoring diagram

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2017642

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.

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:

For those of you unaware VMware recently released the  VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist

What does it do?

“VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.”