@VMwareCares planning to upgrade to 5.1 from 5.0 vcenter. What’s recommended physical or appliance? Ups and downs side of each?

We thought a few more of you might have the same questions so we decided we would take the opportunity to explain the differences between vCenter server and vCenter appliance and under what situation which one should be opted for, over the other.

The vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services. Versions 5.0.1 and 5.1 of the vCSA uses PostgreSQL for the embedded database instead of IBM DB2, which was used in vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 The vCSA embedded postSQL DB supports 5 hosts / 50 virtual machines, with an Oracle DB the vCSA can support 1000 hosts and 10,000 vms. If you configure your vCSA to use an external instance of Single Sign On (SSO), the external SSO instance must be hosted on another vCenter Server Appliance; it cannot be hosted on a Windows machine.

vCenter Server can be installed on a windows Guest OS and can be connected to Oracle or Microsoft SQL. SSO can be installed on the same Guest OS or can be on a different machine. It should be noted that patching of of the vCenter Appliance is not supported.

Below is a table listing more of the differences between the products.

Tonight at 7:30pm PST, vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 will be removed from the VMware download site and will be replaced by vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a. The primary aim of the 5.1 U1a release is to address the regression that was identified in 5.1 U1.

Customers are urged to read the README included with the new update before they apply the update.

Details of what has and has not been fixed are provided in KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2037410

We present you with a new video today, geared towards users of our VMware Workstation product.

The serial number is listed in the order confirmation email you receive for your Workstation purchase. Workstation License Keys that have been registered will be listed in your My VMware account. See Knowledge Base article: Viewing license keys in My VMware (2006831) for additional details.

For additional information, see the associated VMware Knowledge Base article Locating the VMware Workstation serial number (1000069).

Note: For best viewing experience, ensure that the 720p quality setting is selected and view in full screen mode.

In addition, there are several minor bug fixes which were fixed which impacted tool functionality.

For further details and to download the latest version of the SSL tool see: Deploying and Using the SSL Certificate Automation Tool (2041600)

We hope these additions provide useful for everyone!

We have a new video today which is brief and straight to the point. This video is specifically geared towards first-time users of our VMware Fusion product.

This video discusses and demonstrates how you can license VMware Fusion.

In this brief video tutorial you will learn how quick and easy it is to license your VMware Fusion product installation on your Mac operating system.

For more information, see VMware Knowledge Base article Licensing VMware Fusion (2014287).

Note: For best viewing experience, ensure the 720p quality setting is selected and view using full screen mode.

In order to obtain some real world perspective, we met up with some of our Technical Support Engineers at our support center in Cork, Ireland and mainly asked them two questions:

1. What are the most common issues they deal with concerning vSphere Databases?
2. What advice do they have for ensuring that a vSphere Database is maintained?

Here is what they had to say….

Common Issues

The two most common issues that come into our Technical Support teams are:

1. Database Corruption
2. Database Performance

These are really the two biggest issues that customers encounter with their SQL databases in their vSphere environments.

Many a database administrator has nightmares about database corruption and when an incident comes along quite often many hours are spent by the DBA trying to rescue the situation. Sadly, database corruption is something that just happens; nobody plans to have it.

If you are or were a system administrator or a database administrator at some point during your career, chances are that there was probably a time when you learned the hard way about not having a recent database backup.

However it is not all doom and gloom when it comes to database corruption incidents. The impact and headaches of such a corruption incident can be minimized and reduced by simply applying and enforcing a policy of regular database backups. Taking regular database backups will not fix the corrupted database but at least your road to recovery will be a much better and less painful one.

Along with database corruption the other big generator for support requests is that of database performance. A database is like the heart of the environment and just like a heart, if it is in a bad or a poorly maintained condition then it is going to experience performance issues.

The vSphere database is what manages and runs the jobs and processes that take place within the environment in any given moment. The speed at which the vSphere environment can run effectively and efficiently is quite often determined by the health of the database. If your database is unhealthy, then chances are you will notice performance impacts within your environment.

What symptoms should I look out for?

Symptoms of database corruption would include the vCenter Server failing to start or crashing on particular tasks.

Symptoms for database performance related issues can be more varied, however some common ones include:

• The vCenter Server taking a long time to start up
• Tasks taking a long time to complete or are timing out

Some Helpful Database Maintenance Tips

When it comes to database corruption scenarios the best thing that you really can have is a recent backup. This will save a lot of time and heartache when it comes to restoring your environment and the more recent the backup the better as it will minimize the loss of data.

In regards to database performance issues, prevention really is the best cure and so here are some steps and measures which will help to reduce or prevent your environment from encountering poor database performance:

1. Monitor scheduled database jobs to ensure they are running correctly – For more information, refer to KB article: Checking the status of vCenter Server performance rollup jobs (2012226)
2. Collect Stats
3. Rebuild Indexes – For more information, refer to KB article: Rebuilding indexes to improve the performance of SQL Server and Oracle vCenter Server databases (2009918)
4. Delete old data – For more information, refer to KB article: Reducing the size of the vCenter Server database when the rollup scripts take a long time to run (1007453)
5. Monitor Database Growth – For more information, refer to KB article:
   Determining where growth is occurring in the vCenter Server database (1028356)

A pdf document on vCenter Server Database Best Practices is available: VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance Improvements and Best Practices for Large-Scale Environments

unknown user or bad password

or:

The authentication server returned an unexpected error: ns0:RequestFailed: 
Internal Error while creating SAML 2.0 Token. 
The error may be caused by a malfunctioning identity source.

This is caused by a configuration issue related to the groups on the local Operating System having Active Directory users in them.  There is an easy fix to the issue, removing the localOS identity source from vCenter Server Single-Sign-On(SSO). All of the steps are detailed in KB article: Logging in to the vSphere Web Client fails with the error: ns0:RequestFailed: Internal Error while creating SAML 2.0 Token (2043070) but you can think of this as an addendum.

Before you go ahead and remove the local identity source, one should be aware that any local users will no longer have login access once the local identity source is removed.  Also, a domain account should be configured with SSO administrative privileges before removing the identity source.

To remove the identity source, log in to the Web Client using the SSO administrator,(admin@system-domain, go to Administration, then Configuration under Sign-On and Discovery and then remove the Local Identity Source (local machine name) as shown.

A couple of common questions:

Q – What if I can’t log in with SSO Administrator credentials?
A – See Unlocking and resetting the vCenter Single Sign On (SSO) administrator password (2034608)

Q – How do I add an SSO administrator?
A – Log in to the vSphere Web Client as an SSO administrator. By default, this user is admin@system-domain.

In the home page, click Administration > Access > SSO Users and Groups.

Click on the plus sign and add account from identity source.

• Viewing Subscription Services in My VMware (2045030)
• Viewing Subscription Service details in My VMware (2045031)
• Requesting Subscription Service Add-ons in My VMware (2045033)
• Viewing Subscription Services billing statements in My VMware (2045036)
• Viewing Add-on Requests and Add-on request details in My VMware (2045041)
• Viewing available Add-ons for a Subscription Service in My VMware (2051356)

There is news on this alert. Oracle has since resolved the issue in the Windows Oracle Client 11.2.0.3 p16656151 (Patch 19) 64-bit, which can be downloaded today.

The issue is not a VMware bug, it’s an Registry location problem, but customers might still reach for the phone to call us first. We thought we’d try and get the word out today to try and save you some steps (and time).

The problem manifests itself when you attempt to Sysprep a Virtual Machine that has IE10 on it.  In the Sysprep setupact.log log file (located at C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\Panther), you see:

Error[0x0f0085]SYSPRP LaunchDll:Could not load DLL C:\Windows\SysWOW64\iesysprep.dll[gle=0x000000c1]

The registry entry for the location of certain files is incorrect. For further details and resolution, we refer you to KB article: Sysprep fails on Virtual Machine installed with IE10 (2051620).