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From vCenter Server 7 to vCenter Server 8

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 14:52:00 +0000

In this post I'll quickly demonstrate how to upgrade VCSA 7 to VCSA 8. Before starting any of the upgrade always remember to check product compatibility matrix and upgrade path available here.

Once all prerequisites have been verified download the vCenter Server Appliance iso file from official VMware download portal under Vmware customer connect. Then open the iso file from a location where it have access to existing vCenter environment. Open the installer EXE located at Disk:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32

Once the installer runs select the Upgrade option available the GUI.

The first step is to deploy a new VCSA and during the stage 2 it will copy the data of your selection over to newly deployed vCenter Server Appliance.

Read carefully the EULA and accept and click next to continue.

During next step it will ask the credentials to connect to the existing VCSA and fill in the details accordingly.

Then it will ask for a source where this vCenter should be deployed. Either vCenter or ESXi details. In the next step it will ask details for the VM to be deployed and then the size of the new VCSA deployment.

Select the datastore which has enough space to deploy the VCSA.

In this step it will ask for a temporary IP address and other network related details such as default gateway and DNS settings. this IP will be use to power on the VCSA and do the post data migration and then it will automatically changed to the existing IP once the old VCSA powered off automatically.

In this step summary will be displayed for the new VCSA and once click next the new VCSA will start to deploy.

Once the vCenter deployed successfully it will prompt you to continue with the stage 2.

In the stage 2 it will display the introduction page and click next.

Then it will run the pre-upgrade check result and resolve any errors if there is any and if happy with the warnings continue to next step.

Then it will ask which data you wanted to copy over to the new VCSA and depend on your choices estimated downtime will be shown.

Then it will display the summary and once you clicked next all data will be copied over to new VCSA 8 appliance and you can access the vCenter using same IP and DNS settings without any changes to those.

vRealize Log Insight 8.8 Step by Step Installation Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 04:33:00 +0000

When it comes to log management in VMware based environment vRealize Log Insight is a great tool as it delivers real time log management with the capability of analyze terabytes of logs, log archiving and many more features.

The latest version of Log Insight version 8.8 has released recently and through this post I’ll show you the detailed step by step guide to deploy it on your environment. The latest version can be download from below link on official VMware site.

Before deploying the vRealize Log Insight I highly recommend to use the product compatibility matrix above to verify that it is compatible with your current infrastructure.

The First step is to download the Log Insight OVF package and go to your vCenter and select the Datacenter or desired cluster object in left pane, then right click on it and select the deploy OVF template option in the menu.

Then it will start the OVF deployment wizard, where you have the option to either upload local file or URL for the OVF file.

In the next screen it will ask for a name for the VM and location.

Then you will have to provide destination compute resource for the VM.

Then it will display the template details and click next for license agreement.

Then you will be asked for deployment configurations for the VM and select the configuration size that suits for your environment.

Extra Small

This configuration is intended for proof-of-concept or test environments and should not be used in a production environment. This configuration supports up to 20 ESXi hosts (~200 events/second or ~3GB/day) and requires the following: * 2 CPUs (minimum 2.0GHz) * 4GB RAM * 510GB of storage (490GB for event storage) - thick provisioned, eager zeroed highly recommended * VM hardware version 11 or greater (vSphere 6.0 or greater)

Small

For Log Insight clusters medium or large sized nodes should be used. This configuration supports up to 200 ESXi hosts (~2,000 events/second or ~30GB/day) and requires the following: * 4 CPU (minimum 2.0GHz) * 8GB RAM * 510GB of storage (490GB for event storage) - thick provisioned, eager zeroed highly recommended * VM hardware version 11 or greater (vSphere 6.0 or greater)

Medium

This configuration supports up to 500 ESXi hosts (~5,000 events/second or ~75GB/day) and requires the following: * 8 CPU (minimum 2.0GHz) * 16GB RAM * 510GB of storage (490GB for event storage) - thick provisioned, eager zeroed highly recommended * VM hardware version 11 or greater (vSphere 6.0 or greater)

Large

This configuration requires vSphere 6.0 or greater. This configuration supports up to 1,500 ESXi hosts (~15,000 events/second or ~225GB/day) and requires the following: * 16 CPU (minimum 2.0GHz) * 32GB RAM * 510GB of storage (490GB for event storage) - thick provisioned, eager zeroed highly recommended * VM hardware version 11 or greater (vSphere 6.0 or greater)

Then it will ask for the destination storage location.

And destination network.

Then you will be asked to customize the template and in the first section it will ask for root password for this new VM. other fields you can provide if you wish to use custom configs depend on your environment.

In the second section it will ask for network details and you can leave all blanks if you are using DHCP configs for this VM.

Then you will be in final stage of deploying this new VM.

Once the VM is deployed and powered on you can access it via IP or FQDN if you have correct DNS records in place and you will be asked to do a initial setup for Log Insight.

In the Next Screen you will be given the option to choose deployment type either to join existing Log Insight deployment or to start a new deployment. Here I'll choose the new deployment as I don't have an existing setup.

Then you will have to setup admin credentials and this will be used to log in to web interface of Log Insight.

Once the credentials set up it will ask for license key, When you are downloading Log Insight you will get a evaluation key and if you doesn't have a valid product key you can use that to continue with the wizard or you can skip it for now.

In general configuration, you can participate to VMware CEIP program and can setup system email notifications too.

By default time configuration is set to VMware NTP servers and if you wish to use other settings you can configure it here.

Then SMTP configuration according to your organization.

Then you have to configure SSL Certificate settings. Only full feature license will allow you to configure these settings.

Once all the above steps are configured correctly you are ready to go and as a initial step it will ask you to configure vCenter integration, agent installation and syslog configurations.

Integrating with vSphere is a simple task. Where you have to select vSphere integration and provide the necessary details according to your environment.

Extra TIP

During OVF deployment if you didn't put correct IP settings or misconfigured you can change these settings by directly login to the Log Insight VM using root account via DCUI and then run following command.

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

Then based on your requirement you can type the number and configure the settings correctly.

The screen above shows how I re-configred my IPv4 settings for this VM and all other settings can be modified by entering the correct number.

If you have any questions regarding the deployment of Log Insight please comment below and I'm more than happy to help you on this. And I strongly advised you to go through the product documents mentioned in the beginning of this post to get a better picture of the product and it's capabilities.

Nutanix - Node Detached from Metadata Ring

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 16:19:00 +0000

Note: This is some of troubleshooting steps I was taken to resolve the Nutanix alert "Host removed from metadata ring" and if you are unsure or not familiar with running these commands yourself please engage with Nutanix support for fixing the above alert.

A node will be taken out of the Cassandra ring and put in forwarding mode if any of the following conditions match.

The node is completely down for 30 minutes.
7 flaps in 15 minutes for Cassandra restarts.
At least 3 nodes are in the ring after the removal (if you have a 5-node cluster, two nodes might be in this state)

Auto-healing was introduced in AOS version 3.5.x to prevent taking the cluster down due to multiple node failures at different intervals.

After these conditions are met, the node is put in "marked to be detached" state and an alert is sent.

On the following AOS version, CVM in maintenance mode or not available, node/CVM is detached from ring after:

120 minutes - AOS 5.10.10, AOS 5.11.2, AOS 5.14 or later
60 minutes - AOS 5.10.8.x, AOS 5.10.9.x, AOS 5.11, AOS 5.11.1

If you can bring the node or Cassandra to an UP state before the detachment completes, this process is aborted.

If the node is removed from the Metadata ring due to a known network issue or a scheduled activity without marking the CVM in maintenance mode, then the node can be added back to the Metadata ring.

If none of the scenarios explain why the node is removed from the metadata ring, first we have to fix the underlying issue and fix it and then only we can add the node back to the metadata ring.

When a node is detached from metadata ring hardware view and node summary will be shown as follows.

Also similar alert will be appear in Nutanix alert console.

So, lets start with troubleshooting. First check the cluster status by running following command in one of the CVM.

nutanix@cvm:~$ cluster status

As you can see it shows that one of the CVM is in maintenance mode. So use following command to list all of the CVMs and their status.

nutanix@cvm:~$ ncli host list

So in the output we can clearly see that the node which was removed from the metadata ring, it's CVM is in maintenance mode and also above command shows that it has been removed from the metadata ring.

Before removing it I wanted to check cluster upgrade status to make sure there is no any maintenance activities running on the cluster.

nutanix@cvm:~$ upgrade_status
nutanix@cvm:~$ host_upgrade_status
nutanix@cvm:~$ ncc health_checks system_checks cluster_active_upgrade_check

So, now I'm sure that there is no pending upgrade tasks and ready to remove the affected CVM from maintenance mode. Use following command and can find the host ID using ncli host list command.

nutanix@cvm$ ncli host edit id=<<host ID>> enable-maintenance-mode=false

Once the node removed from maintenance mode, in the prism element UI option to add the node back to metadata ring option will be enabled.

Also we can use the following command to enable the metadata store on this node.

nutanix@cvm$ ncli host enable-metadata-store id=<<host ID>>

Progress can be monitor from recent tasks.

Again, if you are not familiar with the steps above or these commands not match with your scenario please engage with Nutanix Support to resolve the issue.

Troubleshooting Steps for Error 503 Service Unavailable

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 13:50:00 +0000

Recently one of our vSphere 6.5 environment had a 503 service unavailable issue and I decided to write down the steps which was taken to resolve the issue. This environment is a single vCenter instance with embedded platform controller. The steps here are in valid for VCSA 6.0 to 6.7 but make sure you follow the reference KB articles which are in the bottom of this post to see if these troubleshooting steps are applicable for your environment as well.

The error displayed in the vSphere client is as below when we trying to access the vCenter.

503 Service Unavailable (Failed to connect to endpoint: [N7Vmacore4Http20NamedPipeServiceSpecE:0x00005619b5fb13a0] _serverNamespace = / action = Allow _pipeName =/var/run/vmware/vpxd-webserver-pipe)

Initially I though this is a temporary service down/busy issue and I gave it couple of mins before trying to troubleshoot but there was no luck.

The 503 error can be displayed due to various issues, So try the VMware service unavailable flow chart for a step by step troubleshooting approach.

But before staring the above troubleshooting flow chart, I identified there is an expired certificate by checking the certificate status from the web browser. So I started with checking the certificate status by using following command.

for store in $(/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli store list | grep -v TRUSTED_ROOT_CRLS); do echo "[*] Store :" $store; /usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli entry list --store $store --text | grep -ie "Alias" -ie "Not After";done;

This will display the following result.

Here you will that Machine SSL certificate is expired and probably that could be the reason for 503 error. So I decided to renew it using VMware certificate manager.

Note: however the vpxd certificate is also expired, but I didn't noticed it at the time.

Run following command in VCSA.

/usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager

As mentioned earlier I didn't notice the vpxd certification's expiry so I continue with option 3. This will require the SSO password and create certool.cfg file if your environment doesn't have any existing config file. Even if you have it you can reconfigure it here by pressing Y and providing the answers for the cert file. And then Y to continue the operation.

The process failed at 0%.

This is probably the VMware Security Token Service or the STS certificate expiry. So I ran the checksts Python script attached in KB #79248. The link is at the bottom of this page.

As you can see there are expired STS certificate hence the certificate renewal failed. So I used fixsts shell script which is attached to KB #76719 to resolve expired STS certificate warnings.

Warning

This script interacts with the VMDIR's database. Take an offline snapshot concurrently for all vCenter Servers and Platform Service Controllers in the SSO domain before running the script. Failing to do so may result in an unrecoverable error and require redeploying vCenter Server.

Notes:

This script should only be run once per SSO domain. In environments containing Horizon View, see Connection Server unable to accept vCenter thumbprint with an error "There was an error identifying the validity of the server" (67701).

To resolve the Signing certificate is not valid error:

Download the attached fixsts.sh script from KB #76719 and upload to the impacted PSC or vCenter Server with Embedded PSC to the /tmp folder.
If the connection to upload to the vCenter by the SCP client is rejected, run this from an SSH session to the vCenter: chsh -s /bin/bash
Connect to the PSC or vCenter Server with an SSH session if you have not already per Step 2.
Navigate to the /tmp directory: cd /tmp
Run chmod +x fixsts.sh to make the file executable.
Run ./fixsts.sh.
Restart services on all vCenters and/or PSCs in your SSO domain by using below commands:

service-control --stop --all

service-control --start --all

While starting the services I noticed that vpxd is failed to start. Then I ran the certificate manager again with option 4 instead 3 to regenerate a new VMCA certificate and replace all certificates.

which resolve the 503 issue for me. However while searching for possible scenarios I noticed that some people stuck with certification renewal process at 85% due to known issue in VCSA 6.5 because of the Update Manager Service. You can resolve it by following KB #2150895

Keep in mind that If you replaced Machine SSL or VMCA Root certificates, you will need to re-register 2nd party solutions such as NSX, SRM, and vSphere Replication.

I didn't include too much screenshots here and too much details about the steps. So if you are not familiar with each of steps above please see below KB articles to be familiar with the process.

"503 Service Unavailable" error on the vSphere Web Client when logging in or accessing the vCenter Server (67818)

Verify and resolve expired vCenter Server certificates using command line (82332)

How to use vSphere Certificate Manager to Replace SSL Certificates (2097936)

Checking Expiration of STS Certificate on vCenter Servers (79248)

"Signing certificate is not valid" error in VCSA 6.5.x,6.7.x or vCenter Server 7.0.x (76719)

Replacing vCenter Server certificates fails when VMware Update Manager service is enabled (2150895)

Using the 'lsdoctor' Tool (80469)

Fix lookup service registration after SSL Certificate renewal

VMworld 2021 - My top 10 Sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 06:10:00 +0000

VMworld, the largest multi-cloud global conference is happening this year from October 5th on wards. As still the world is suffering from the pandemic this time also it's a virtual event and so take the great opportunity and participate to the biggest online tech event to gain knowledge, build your network and join with many fun events. Here are my top 10 VMworld session list which I believe I should attend too.

Always Available Infrastructure in vSphere - Design Studio [UX2501]

Have you ever struggled when vCenter is unavailable and critical operations like Provisioning, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and High Availability (HA), tightly coupled with the vCenter availability, are not functioning? We are working on a solution that will make your infrastructure independent from vCenter failure to ensure that there will be no impact on your ability to provision, manage and monitor it. Let's find out together the best possible ways to address your needs.

I believe this is going to be a big improvement in vSphere environment as I've struggle with this issues many times and believe other VMware admins too. vCenter HA is already a configurable feature within your vSphere environment but with some limitations so I'm exciting to see how this is different than existing vCenter HA configuration.

Speaker : Darina Stoyanova-Mincheva - Product Designer, VMware
Primary Product: VMware vSphere
Primary Audience: SysAdmin/VI Admin
Session Type: UX Design Studio
Pass Type: General and Tech+ Passes

Accelerate and Optimize AI/ML with VMware vSphere and NVIDIA GPUs [VI1322]

In the first part of this tutorial, you will learn about the concepts of machine learning (ML), including inference and training, supervised and unsupervised learning, and deep learning. Gain an understanding of the latest advances in ML and what types of problems can be solved with these techniques. Then, we will focus on the IT infrastructure needed to support ML, including a detailed discussion of the ways specialized hardware accelerators, such as GPUs, are enabled on VMware vSphere, along with a discussion of ML performance. VMware’s partnership with NVIDIA and available solutions will be discussed.

This would be a great beginner session to learn machine learning concepts and how the infrastructure needs to configure hardware accelerate enable ML within the organization. However this session is available only for the Tech+ pass holders.

Speaker : Mohan Potheri - Staff Solutions Architect, VMware
Topic : Enable Intelligent Apps & Infrastructure - ML, AI & HPC
Track : Vision & Innovation
Primary Product : VMware vSphere
Primary Audience : Enterprise Architect
Session Type : Tech+ Tutorial
Level : Technical 300
Pass Type : Tech+ Pass Only

Accelerate Your Clod Migration with VMware Cloud on AWS [APP2836S]

Cloud is increasingly becoming the new normal for enterprises. Many enterprises are migrating to VMware Cloud on AWS to achieve IT cost savings, improvements in productivity, business agility, and operational resilience. In this session, explore strategies, methodologies and best practice patterns to accelerate your VMware Cloud migration journey. Learn how to plan a VMware Cloud on AWS migration, mobilize your VMware Cloud on AWS foundation, and execute migrations at scale.

Cloud, of course a hot topic these days and personally this will be a great opportunity for me to learn more about VMware on AWS as my enterprise is also running a hybrid solution. As topic says lets prepare for cloud migration with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Speaker : Robert Rodriguez, Sr. Consultant, VMware on AWS, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Speaker : Eugene Yu, Principal Practice Manager, AWS
Topic : Architect for Hybrid & Multi-Cloud
Track : Multi-Cloud, App Modernization
Primary Product: VMware Cloud on AWS
Primary Audience : VP, Infrastructure & Operations
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 200
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

Anatomy of the VMware SOC [SEC1048]

Follow the journey of our internal Security Operations Center and how we are enabling ease of collaboration among security personnel across different technologies and locations, providing a full view of an attack remotely. With the rise of the machines and automated cyberattacks coupled with a plethora of entry points now being the norm, traditional perimeter controls are leaking like a sieve. It's time to challenge the security status quo and re-think your SOC and security strategy.

Cyber Security another vital aspect in every organization but became more hot topic these days with the work from home model and recent breaches in many organization accross the globe. This will a great session for vSphere admin as they are also responsible for their environment security.

Speaker : Sandra Wenzel, Sr. Cybersecurity Transformation Engineer, VMware
Topic : Modernize the Security Operations Center
Track : Security
Primary Product : VMware NSX Data Center
Primary Audience : CISO, CSO, ISO or VP, Security
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 200
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

A Tour of the Heart of the 5G Network with Nokia and VMware [EDG1935]

In this breakout session, VMware and Nokia will take you on a tour of the heart of the 5G network: the data plane user function. Together, we will understand the unique nature of the user plane function (UPF), the challenges of running very high data rates and low latency in software, and the solutions that Nokia and VMware jointly bring to the table. In this fascinating session, we will share best practices, design thinking, tips and tricks, as well as real-world scenarios that you can take directly back to your network for implementation.

5G, the new industry revolution in mobile network. VMware one of the leader in implementing 5G enables infrastructure and also Nokia a known leader in mobile industry will deliver a work through the heart of the 5G network.

Speaker : Jeremy Brayley, Product Manager, Nokia
Speaker : Ninad Desai, Senior Director of Product Management, VMware
Speaker : Sanjay Wadhwa, Nokia
Topic : Modernize Communication Service Provider Networks
Track : Edge
Primary Product : VMware Telco Cloud Portfolio
Primary Audience : Communication Service Provider
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 200
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

Avoid a Rough Patch: Manage Windows Patching at Scale From The Cloud [EUS2491]

A DeskCon experience session.Tired of wasted effort manually testing OS and app updates for compatibility? Spending too much time checking if patches have actually deployed to systems, especially if they're off the network? Join this session to learn how to automate some of the most mundane OS and third-party app patch management tasks. Discover how to leverage analytics, insights, and automation so you are not stuck in the rut of constant testing and servicing cadence. We will show you how to save time so you can focus on higher-value work.

This will be a great session for sysadmins who manage the windows patching. Not all VMware admins involve in Windows patching but early in my career I worked with different client systems and my scope contain one of the most tought part I'd say the patching of Windows OS. So this will be great session for any sysadmin who are still struggling with Windows patching.

Speaker : Ryan Kremkau, VMware
Speaker : Grischa Ernst, Customer Success Architect, VMware
Topic : Embrace Unified Endpoint Management
Track : End User Services
Primary Product : VMware Workspace ONE
Primary Audience : End User Computing Specialist
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 100
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

Cloud Native Fundamentals: Containers and Kubernetes 101 for the VI Admin [MCL1257]

Containers, Docker and Kubernetes. We hear so much about them these days, but the tech is moving so fast that it can be challenging to understand what they are and the impact they will have. Come to this session to get a foundational container technical education. Find out what they are, and why they are gaining so much traction in the development community. You will get a technical overview of containers and Kubernetes. The speaker will employ terms and use cases relatable to infrastructure engineers. You will also see some demos of this technology in action to bring the concepts home. This session will close with a short discussion of the latest VMware technology relevant in the container space.

App modernization with VMware is a new feature introduced with vSphere 7 and many admins will have the chalange to support this model within their environment. This session will help you to learn fundementals of containers and Kubernetes and this will be surely and informative session for anyone who is interesting in building cloud native applications.

Speaker : Ulrich Hoelscher, Senior Platform Architect, VMware Inc
Speaker : Alexander Ullah, Kubernetes Staff System Engineer, VMware
Topic : Adopt Kubernetes
Track : App Modernization
Primary Product : VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu
Primary Audience : SysAdmin/VI Admin
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 100
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

Decoding VMUG [IC2827S]

VMware User Group (VMUG) President Steve Athanas invites you to tune in as he breaks down VMUG into four key points that define the community comprised of global VMware enthusiasts: voices, membership, unique stories, and global.

Have you ever attend to a VMUG session ? As a VMUG leader I invite you all to join with this session and get an idea of what VUMG is doing to build the VMware community accross the globe and how you can help to build the community. Being a VMUG member will not help the community but it also help you for your professional development as well.

Speaker : Steve Athanas, Associate CIO for System Architecture , UMass Lowell
Topic : Support Professional Development
Track : Inspire Change
Primary Product : VMware vSphere
Primary Audience : SysAdmin/VI Admin
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Business 100
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

From vSphere Admin to Site Reilability Engineer - Where Do I Start [CODE2795]

Does the idea of up-leveling your skillset from vSphere Admin to Site Reliability Engineer excite you, but you don't know where to start? Let us help! This session will be delivered by engineers who made a similar transition; we will guide you toward the skillset and mindset changes that this transition requires. From the architecture changes, to the imperative vs. declarative shift, this session has it all! Go from zero to SRE in less than an hour!

Are you looking for career development ? This is the right session for you. If you seen the Linkedin jobs you will see that now many companies looking for SREs not Administrators. So learn from the industry experts to become a SRE.

Speaker : Ryan Conley, Staff Solution Engineer, VMware
Speaker : Michael Fleisher, Staff Solution Engineer, VMware
Topic : Adopt Kubernetes
Track : App Modernization
Primary Product : VMware Tanzu
Primary Audience : SysAdmin/VI Admin
Session Type : VMware {code}
Level : Technical 100
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

10 Things You Need to Know About Project Monterey [MCL1833]

Project Monterey was announced in the VMworld 2020 keynote. There has been tremendous work done since then. This session details how Project Monterey and SmartNICs will redefine the data center with decoupled control and data planes for management, networking, storage and security—for VMware ESXi hosts and for bare-metal systems. We will discuss 10 things you need to know about Project Monterey to help accelerate your business. Find out how it helps to increase performance, security and manageability for the entire spectrum of VMware vSphere and bare-metal infrastructure management. We will cover and demo the overall architecture and use cases.

Finally my all time favourite topic on any VMworld session, VMware's future projects. This will give us an idea what VMware is currently working on and you can get the idea of what will be available for you in future from VMware.

Speaker : Sudhanshu Jain, Director Product Management, VMware
Speaker : Niels Hagoort, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Topic : Modernize to Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure
Track : Multi-Cloud
Primary Product : VMware vSphere
Primary Audience : CTO
Session Type : Breakout Session
Level : Technical 200
Pass Type : General and Tech+ Passes

These are the my top 10 list of sessions that I think I should attend to. If this list is not the best suitable sessions for you, you have 900 sessions at VMworld 2021 to check this out here.

VMworld 2021

Introduction to vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) in vSphere 7 Update 1

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 14:28:00 +0000

With the release of vSphere 7 update 1, VMware has introduced new functionality called vSphere Cluster Services or simply vCLS. This feature allowed the DRS to function without the vCenter by offloading the cluster services to a small footprint VM.

vCLS VM

These new VMs are essentials to cluster functionality from vSphere 7U1 onward and will be managed by ESXi agent management mechanism thus not require any configurations from vSphere admins. When you deploy a new VCSA using vSphere 7U1 release or if you upgrade your existing vSphere7 vCenter to update 1 this will automatically deploy these new vCLS VM for you.

Depending on the number of ESXi hosts in you cluster there will be 1 to 3 vCLS VMs in your cluster. IF you have one Esxi hosts there will be only one vCLS VM. There will be two vCLS VMs if you have only two ESXi hosts in your cluster. For clusters having more than 3 ESXi hosts there will be only three vCLS VMs.

As below screen capture this VM configured with 1 vCPU, 128MB of memory and 2GB of thin provisioned disk.

vCLS VM Settings

As you can see this VM doesn't have a NIC attached to it and it uses VMCI interface to communicate with the ESXi.

The VMCI is a high speed mechanism that VM uses to communicate with each other when they are running on same ESXi hosts.

So far with my findings on my home lab, I don't see any option to change the name of this VM and the deploy process of this VM is fully automated and doesn;t require any user input.

vCLS deploy event

I have tested this on single node cluster and during the maintenance operation, this VM automatically powered off when putting host into the maintenance mode so no manual intervention required. When there is more than 1 host in the cluster this VM can be automatically migrated off to another host depending on the resource availability and of course there should be shared storage between ESXi hosts in the cluster.

Warning

vSphere Cluster Services manage the resources, power state and availability of this vCLS VM. vSphere Cluster Service VMs are required for maintaining the health and availability of vSphere Cluster Services. Any impact on the power state or resources of these VMs might degrade the health of vSphere Cluster Services and cause vSphere DRS to ceise operation for the cluster.

Configure vCenter HA with vSphere 7.0

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 10:49:00 +0000

vCenter HA is a high availability option for vCenter appliance which introduced with vSphere 6.5 and here I'll explain how to configure vCenter HA with vSphere version 7.0.

vCenter HA is different from vSphere HA. vSphere HA is a availability solution for the virtual machines in the cluster and during a HA fail-over the VM/s will be rebooted in other available ESXi hosts within the cluster. However vCenter can be protected using the vSphere HA but there are some scenarios where that restart time (downtime) is not acceptable. With vCenter HA, there is 3 nodes consists of the VCHA architecture called, Active, Passive and Witness.

vCenter HA topology

Active Node: This is the active appliance that serve all the client requests and appliance that expose to the end users via the vSphere web client. This node will be communicating with passive node for replication and with witness node for cluster status monitoring over the dedicated vCenter HA network.

Passive Node: This is initially a clone of the active vCenter and then continuously sync with the active node over the vCenter HA network. If any failures occurs in the active node, this will immediately take over the active node role.

Witness Node: This lightweight clone from the active node provide the quorum to the cluster.

Software and Hardware Requirements

To configure VCHA the ESXi version should be 5.5 or higher and it's strongly recommended 3 ESXi node cluster. Also it's recommended to use DRS rules to put these 3 modes in separate ESXi hosts as well.

As I mentioned earlier the minimum vCenter version is 6.5 and this requires only one vSphere standard license. The recommended deployment size is small or bigger ones as tiny is not recommended for production environments. vCenter HA is supported and tested with VMFS, NFS, and vSAN datastores.

The vCenter HA network must be on separate subnet than the management network and the latency between active, passive and witness node must be less than 10ms.

vCenter 7.0 HA Configuration - Step by Step

As mentioned earlier this HA configuration needs a dedicated network for HA related traffice so I'm going to add a new NIC for the VCSA.

1. Log in to thr vCenter and find the VCSA appliance. Edit VM settings and add new NIC card and assign the vLAN created for the VCHA network.

2. Login to VCSA appliance management interface using below URL.

https://<<your VC IP or FQDN>>:5480/#/login

3. Navigate to networking tab from the left hand side menu and click edit link on the top right side for the newly added NIC.

VCSA network configuration.

4. Once you click the edit link, it will ask you to select which interface you need to change and select the NIC added for the VCHA network.

Select Network Adaptor.

5. These select Either automatic DNS and IP reservation or enter both details manually depending on your network configuration.

Edit NIC IP Settings.

6. Then it will show the summary and click finish if you are happy with the network configuration.

Edit Network Settings

7. Then NIC settings will show as follows.

IP Settings Summary.

8. Once VCSA appliance additional NIC configured for VCHA, navigate to vCenter web interface and select the vCenter from inventory menu in Left hand side, select Configure tab , vCenter HA and Click SET UP VCENTER HA button.

Set Up vCenter HA

9. Then it will go through the guided process of configuring the VCHA. When configuring VCHA you can clone the vCenter appliance by your self for Passive and Witness nodes or you can simply let the vCenter to do that for you. in earlier versions this was called as Basic and Advanced mode. But with the vSphere 7 it's just a checkbox for you to select that automatic process. Since I'll be doing it that way tick the check box to automatically clone passive and witness node and then it will ask the relevant details for passive and witness nodes

Resource Settings.

10. To configure the required settings for passive node click Edit Icon as shown in below.

Passive Node Settings

11. Then it will ask the name for the witness node, I'll leave it with default chosen name and we need to specify the location for this VM.

Passive Node Resource Settings.

12. Then we need to select the compute resource for the passive node. As I mentioned earlier, it is recommended to separate these 3 nodes from each other so select a ESXi host which is currently the active VCSA is not running.

Passive Node Resource Settings.

13. Select the datastore or datastore cluster. Also make sure the 3modes will not sitting on the same datastore to avoid single point of failures.

14. Then select the correct port groups for both management network interface and VCHA network interface.

Passive Node Resource Settings.

15. Then review the settings and click Finish to save the settings.

Passive Node Resource Settings.

16. Then Click the Edit button next to Witness node details to enter the details for witness node as well. In the witness node configuration it will not ask for management network interface as it will not take over the load during a failure, it's just here for quorum purpose only.

Witness Node Resource Settings.

17. Click Next button to enter the IP settings for both passive and witness nodes. The IP settings will require only for the VCSA HA network and same Management IP will be used by the passive node during a failure.

Network Settings for Passive and Witness Node.

Then click Finish to start the configurations. The progress will be shown in the same vCenter HA tab and also you can see the current progress in recent task list as well.

Once the HA setup is finished you can see the summary of current status of the VCHA and some other available options as well.

What To Do When vCenter root Password Expired ?

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:43:00 +0000

If you happen to have expired root password for your vCenter appliance login, you will get following error message when you try to log into the appliance via management URL.

Exception in invoking authentication handler User password expired.

This is because you have forget to change your vCenter root password before it expired and the solution is simple.

First, log into the vCenter appliance via SSH and still your expired password is valid to login here.

Then type "shell" and press enter to enable shell commands.

Then enter passwd command to reset the password. this will ask the new password two times and once you enter it correctly, you are good to go with the new password.

Basic CLI reference related for Nutanix Upgrade.

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 18:35:00 +0000

Last two weeks I was engaged with some Nutanix cluster upgrades and I had some different issues in my clusters. So I decided to write this post to summarize the troubleshooting steps I have taken and if you are not confident running these commands and do the troubleshooting by yourself, always engage with Nutanix Support.

Before any upgrade it is always recommended to view the release notes for fixed and known bugs for particular version, check the Compatibility matrix and Upgrade Path as well. Here I have listed following important documents for you.

Software Documentation – for release notes for each software component.

Upgrade path – to check your current software version can be upgraded to the desired or latest version. In this simple form you have to select the Software type, current version and target version. So it will show you whether it is supported or not by Green or Red colour respectively.

Nutanix upgrade paths

Software Product Interoperability – From here you can check the Nutanix software component compatibility with each other. If your Prism Elements are registered with Prism Central it is always recommended to upgrade Prism Central first then each Prism Elements.

Software Product Interoperability

Check Uptime and Last Reboot time for CVM or AHV Host

During my upgrades, I wanted to check the uptime in both CVMs and AHV Hosts because I wasn’t sure they were properly rebooted. So I used following steps to check the uptime of each component.

Check the uptime of CVM.

Login to CVM via SSH and the enter the following command. This will show the current CVM uptime. If you want to run this command cluster wide, use ‘allssh’ parameter first.

nutanix@cvm$ uptime

nutanix@cvm $ allssh uptime

This will display the current time, Up Time of each CVM, current user session and load average details.

uptime

Check the last reboot details for CVM.

nutanix@cvm$ last reboot

nutanix@cvm$ allssh ‘last reboot’

last reboot

This will display the last rebooted timestamp for each CVM.

Check the uptime of AHV hosts in the cluster.

nutanix@cvm$ hostssh uptime

uptime of AHV hosts

Check the last reboot details for AHV hosts.

Login to CVM via SSH and the enter the following command. This will show the current last reboot timestamp of each host in the cluster.

nutanix@cvm$ hostssh ‘last reboot’

last reboot

In any case you wanted to get the CVM IPs of you cluster use following command.

nutanix@cvm$ svmips

Check any pending/ongoing or current upgrade status.

When you are in upgrade process, if you want to check the upgrade status of your CVMs you can use the following command in any CVM of the cluster

nutanix@cvm$ upgrade_status

upgrade status

this will display the running AOS version, cluster upgrade method and status of each CVM.

If you want to check the AHV host upgrade status, you can use the following commands.

nutanix@cvm$ host_upgrade_status

Also you can use NCC checks to see the upgrade status of your cluster

nutanix@cvm$ ncc health_checks system_checks cluster_active_upgrade_check

Pre-Upgrade checks failed with Pre-Upgrade check:test_cluster_status.

If you happen to get the above error during a pre-upgrade check, this could be due to one of following reason.

1. Failed to execute a cluster status

Run the "cluster status" command as below. If it executes, run pre-upgrade check again. If it fails, engage Nutanix Support.

nutanix@cvm$ cluster_status

2. No services are running on [ip]

Run the "cluster start" command as below on CVM (Controller VM) IP mentioned in the message. If it fails, engage Nutanix Support.

nutanix@cvm$ cluster_start

3. [Service Name] service is down on [ip]

Run the "cluster start" command as below on CVM IP mentioned in the message. If it fails, engage Nutanix Support.

nutanix@cvm$ cluster_start

Put AHV hosts into maintenance mode.

During an upgrade process you may want to manually put AHV host/s into maintenance mode. This can be accomplished by using following commands.

List available AHV hosts

nutanix@cvm$ acli host.list

acli host.list

this will display the AHV hosts along with schedulable status which means the maintenance mode status. If Schedulable status is true means host is not in maintenance mode and currently holds production workload. So if you want to put a host/s into maintenance mode you can use following command. This will automatically migrate the VMs running on host into available hosts in cluster.

nutanix@cvm$ acli host.enter_maintenance_mode <<IP of the Host>>

once the host is put into maintenance mode successfully the status will be shown in putty session. Also you can use the previous command to check the maintenance mode operation success or not.

AHV maintenance mode

Exit AHV host/s from maintenance mode

To exit an AHV host/s from maintenance mode you can use the following command.

nutanix@cvm$ acli host.exit_maintenance_mode <<IP of the Host>>

Controller VM maintenance mode

If you want to put your CVM, you can use the following commands. As a parameter it required host ID which you can find using below command.

nutanix@cvm$ ncli host list

ncli host list

once host ID identified use following command to enter CVM into maintenance mode.

nutanix@cvm$ ncli host edit id=<<host ID>> enable-maintenance-mode=true

use the same command to exit it from the maintenance mode with the switch ‘false’

nutanix@cvm$ ncli host edit id=<<host ID>> enable-maintenance-mode=false

Hope this commands will help you with your Nutanix upgrade. This is not a complete command line refference but I have inclueded some important commands in this post. If you find any other command/s useful during Nutanix upgrade process please comment them below.

Also following posts will be helpful for you if you have similar issues.

VM Migration Operation Failed: Host Is Not Schedulable.

Nutanix - Foundation upgrade failed with services running on one of the node.

Upgrade LCM on Nutanix Cluster Without Internet Connectivity.

Configure Bakup and Restore with VCSA 7

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 09:15:00 +0000

With the release of vSphere 6.5 VMware has introduced file-based backup solution and now it's become the native backup solution for backing-up VCSA. This file-based backup configuration is available through VCSA management interface and support FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, NFS, or SMB protocols.

The following considerations apply to file-based backup and restore protocols:

FTP and HTTP are not secure protocols
Backup servers must support minimum of 10 simultaneous connections for each vCenter Server
You must have write permissions for upload and read permissions for download
Only explicit mode is supported for FTPS
If you use HTTP or HTTPS, you must enable WebDAV on the backup Web server
You can use only FTP, FTPS, HTTP, or HTTPS to transmit data through an HTTP proxy server
You can use IPv4 and IPv6 URLs in file-based backup and restore of a vCenter Server. Mixed mode of IP versions between the backup server and the vCenter Server is unsupported.
The vCenter Server appliance GUI installer does not support restore from a backup with NFS or SMB protocol. To perform a restore from an NFS or SMB protocol, use the vCenter Server Management API.

Configure Backup for VCSA.

Before taking a backup, a backup server must be set up and configured such that the vCenter server has access to it. The protocols supported for backup are FTPS, HTTPS, SFTP, FTP, NFS, SMB and HTTP.

log into VCSA management interface by navigating to https://<<VCSA FQDN or IP address>>:5480/

Click the Backup tab from the left pane and configure option in the top right.

Configure the Backup schedule.

Backup Location: Use the following format to provide the address and location: protocol://server-address<:port-number>/folder/subfolder

Backup server credentials: Enter a user name and password of a user with write privileges on the backup server.

Schedule: The recurrence can be set daily, weekly, or you can customize the schedule to run the backup on a specific day or days of the week. You can specify the time of day to run the backup. The default time is 11:59pm. And its the configured vCenter time.

Encrypt backup (optional): Enter an Encryption Password if you want to encrypt your backup file. If you select to encrypt the backup data, you must use the encryption password for the restore procedure.

DB Health Check: DB Health Check helps you determine the status of your database. Backup will take longer if the DB health check is enabled.

Number of backups to retain: The retention policy either to keep all or number of last backups as per your requirement.

Data: (Optional) Select Stats, Events, and Tasks to back up additional historical data from the database.

Once the above details are filled, click Create button to create new backup policy. You can see the backup policy status under the Backup Schedule section and also you have the options to Edit, Disable or Delete.

Also you can take a manual backup using Backup Now option in the activity section.

This wizard will ask you the backup location and credentials, but if you select to use the backup location and user name from backup schedule it will automatically get the required data from the backup schedule. Then click Start to take the manual backup.

You can monitor the progress in the activity section.

Also the recent backup information will be displayed here.

Restore VCSA Using Existing Backup

To restore a VCSA from a file-based backup we needs to run the VCSA installer and in first stage it will deploy a OVA file and then in stage two it will copy data from the backup to this newly created VCSA.

Important:

If the vCenter Server instance is part of a vCenter High Availability cluster, you must power off the active, passive, and witness nodes of the cluster before restoring the vCenter Server.
The restore process requires that both the installer and backup versions are identical.

Run the installer.exe located at L:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 (L is the drive where I mounted the .iso file) and select the restore option.

The first screen will give you an introduction about the restore process and the next stage will the EULA. Then it will ask for the backup details.

Use 'Address/Folder/Subfolder' format to provide the address and location and the remote location must contain the valid metadata JSON file.

In the next step it will show the backup details.

Then it will prompt for vCenter Server deployment target settings. The target is the ESXi host or vCenter Server instance on which the vCenter Server will be deployed.

Then you will be prompted for VM settings for this new VCSA.

Then select the deployment size of this new VCSA

And the datastore.

The next screen will auto populate the network settings from the given backup. here you can change or you can keep the current settings as it is. If you are keeping existing IP then make sure you have powered off the old VCSA to avoid IP conflicts.

Once review the details click Finish to start the stage 1 process.

Once the deploy stage finish, we can continue with the stage 2.

After the introduction screen, it will display the backup details from the selected backup file in the stage 1. and in the next screen it will ask you the SSO credentials. Here you have to enter the SSO password which you old VCSA had.

Then it will run a validation it self and display the errors and warnings. If you get any errors you have to fix those and if you have only warnings and you are happy to continue you can ignore the warnings as well.

Then again it will show you the summary and you can click finish to configure the new VCSA as per the configuration in the selected backup file.

This mechanism will deploy new VCSA and restore data onto it not to the original VCSA. If you have restored a corrupted VCSA from a file-based backup you have to manually remove the corrupted VCSA from the inventory.

VM Migration Operation Failed: Host Is Not Schedulable

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 14:55:00 +0000

During VM migration process in Nutanix Cluster running AHV you might receive the error "Operation failed: Host <<UUID>> is not schedulable. Here is simple troubleshooting guide to check and resolve the issue.

Connect to any CVM in problematic cluster and run the following command.

nutanix@cvm:~$ acli host.list

This will list the mapping of hosts in the cluster and their shedulable status.

As you can see in above example, out of three nodes there is two nodes which schedulable status is False. which mean these are currently in maintenance mode and are not ready to take the workload.

Then run the same command against a host which schedulable status is false.

nutanix@cvm:~$ acli host.get <<host UUID or IP address>>

Then carefully check the node status in the output. if node_state: "kEnteredMaintenanceMode" it means that host was put into maintenance mode. It may be done explicitly by administrator or automatically (during AHV upgrade for example).

Example output is below.

X.X.X.X {

cpu_usage_ppm: 31187

cvm_memory_size_bytes: 34359738368

cvm_num_vcpus: 12

cvm_uuid: "<<UUID of CVM>>"

logical_timestamp: 262917

max_mem_ha_reserved_bytes: 0

mem_assigned_bytes: 0

mem_usage_bytes: 37148950528

memory_size_bytes: 404250165248

node_state: "kEnteredMaintenanceMode" <--------------

num_cpus: 64

schedulable: False

uuid: "<<host UUID>>"

}

To remove the host/s from maintenance mode run the following command.

nutanix@cvm:~$ acli host.exit_maintenance_mode <<host UUID or IP address>>

Please do not exit maintenance mode during AHV, firmware or other upgrades initiated from LCM or 1-Click as this can lead to unexpected consequences.

Note: If you are not confident running above troubleshooting steps by your self please raise a support case with Nutanix.

This also will apply for scenario which VMs failed to power on with the same error.

Deploy and Configure vSphere Replication 8.3

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Tue, 19 May 2020 15:05:00 +0000

VMware vSphere replication is a hypervisor-based replication mechanism that we can integrate to the vCenter. This is a alternative solution to storage-based replication which can protect virtual machines from a site failure. These sites can be any of following.

From one cluster to another cluster within same vCenter.
From a local site to a remote site.
From multiple local sites (source) to shared remote site.

The latest available version is 8.3.0.1 and this article covers the 8.3 version. The appliance comes as a 64bit virtual appliance and can be configured as either 2vCPU or 4vCPU and have 8GB of system memory and two HDDs. The vSphere replication appliance 8.3 currently supports from vCenter version 6.5U2 to vCenter server version 7. It is always recommend to check the product compatibility with VMware Product Interoperability Matrices before deploying the appliance.

vSphere Replication is a feature that comes with following vSphere licenses.

vSphere Essentials Plus
vSphere Standard
vSphere Enterprise
vSphere Enterprise Plus

Also vSphere replication is a network-based replication mechanism thus it provide lower cost per replication while storage-based replication require special licenses to do so.

Deploying vSphere Replication Appliance

To deploy the replication appliance first you have to download the .ISO file from my vmware portal. Once downloaded it mount the .ISO to you PC or a server which have access to your vCenter server.

Navigate to the DVD ROM and you can see there are multiple of files related to OVF deployment. The files with 'AddOn' are the files use for additional appliance deployment and files without 'AddOn' are the files require for the master appliance.

Files inside the .iso file

To deploy the appliance login to your vCenter and then select the data center that you want to deploy the appliance --> right click on it and then select 'Deploy OVF Template' from the menu. Then OVF deployment wizard will be open.

Deploy OVF Template

Select the 'Local File' option and click 'Uoload Files' to select the required files for the appliance deployment. The required files located under the 'bin' folder on your mounted .iso file and those are:

vSphere_Replication_OVF10.cert
vSphere_Replication_OVF10.mf
vSphere_Replication_OVF10.ovf
vSphere_Replication-support.vmdk
vSphere_Replication-system.vmdk

Once the above files are selected continue Next.

Select a name and folder

In this stage you have to select the location and give a name for your virtual appliance. once those information are provided continue to the next step to select a compute resource and once you have selected a ESXi based on your environment click continue and it will provide a template details for you to review.

Template Details

Once those are verified continue Next to review the license agreement and if you agree mark the check box and continue.

Select Deployment Configuration

In here you can select the number of vCPU assigned to you appliance. Once desired vCPU are selected click continue.

Select storage

In here you can encrypt the appliance, but it isn't required you to configure replication for encrypted VMs. Also you can select the disk format and the desired datastore to deploy the replication appliance.

Select Networks

This stage will let you to select the managment network for your replication appliance and the IP allocation settings either static or manual and the IP version. The next screen will ask you the network settings if you select manual.

Customize Template

In the first half of the configuration wizard, you have to provide a Password for your appliance and NTP servers to use. Make sure that you enter the same settings as your vCenter server here for the NTP settings.

Networking Properties

In the bottom half you will be asked to provide the IP address settings if you have selected manual for IP assigning. Once those are provided click continue.

vService bindings

This will ask to select the vCenter binding settings and select vCenter Extention vService to integrate the replication appliance with the vCenter. Then next screen will provide you a summary about the appliance that you are about to deploy.

When you click Finish the OVF import will be started and you can monitor the progress under the recent task in you vCenter Server. Once the OVF file imported you have to manually power on the newly deployed appliance.

When the VM power on, navigate to https://<FQDN or IP address of your replication appliance>>:5480 to start the configuration of the appliance.

Replication Appliance

Provide the root credentials set during the appliance deployment and once logged in select 'configuration' tab to do the initial configurations.

Startup Configuration

In here you have to provide the vcenter FQDN as the LookupService address and SSO credentials to the vCenter, VRM host details and VRM site Name as you preferred then press Save and Restart Service button to enable the vSphere replication service.

then it will prompt to accept the certificate. Click Accept.

one everything success the service will be started and you can see the status on the bottom of the page.

After this you can re-login to the vCenter and verify that Site Recovery Manager extension enabled in vCenter.

Site Recovery Extension

You can click the shortcut and it will show the summary about the replication appliance. also it will provide the link to either configure appliance it self or the site recovery.

Site Recovery

You have to do the same configuration in your remote site as well. vSphere replication is compatible with N-1 version of remote site. which means if your primary site uses vSphere replication 8.3 you can install vSphere replication 8.2 or later but make sure the vSphere replication is compatible with current vCenter Server version.

This post discussed deploying and configuring vSphere replication appliance in local and remote site. But depend on the your requirement the required vSphere replication appliances might be differ from the article above.

Once both replication appliances configured this is how it looks like in my environment.

Site Recovery

Configure Enhanced Linked Mode for Existing VCSA

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Tue, 12 May 2020 15:31:00 +0000

In my home lab setup I have two vCenter servers configure with vSphere 7 and using vsphere.local default SSO domain. But at the time deploying these two VCSA appliances I have not configured them as replication partners so these two is not configured to use enhanced linked mode.

Recently I wanted to configure them in enhanced linked mode to make my management tasks more easier, I have followed VMware KB article found here and here are the details steps I have taken.

Caution: Make sure you have taken file-based backup for each vCenters, in any case if want to restore.

Also this re pointing mechanism is only available after vSphere 6.7 update 1 release and later.

Current Configuration:

I have two vCenters in my lab called VC01 and VCSA001. Both uses vsphere.local SSO.

Current vCenter Configuration

And, If I navigate to the Linked vCenter Server Systems tab in either vCenter, I can see only empty screen as there is no such setup yet.

Linked vCenter Server Systems

I want to link VC02 as a replication partner to VC01 and so I can enable ELM for VCs.

Configuration Steps:

SSH to VC002 and then run per-checks to ensure there is no conflicts. This will not modify any configurations, but will fetch role and privileges, tags and categories information from the VC02 (source VCSA) and checks the conflicts against the VC01 (destination VCSA).

To do this configuration we use cmsso-util command and you can see the available syntax from here.

Run the following command in source vCenter, in my case VC02.

cmsso-util domain-repoint -m pre-check --src-emb-admin Administrator --replication-partner-fqdn <<FQDN_of_destination_node>> --replication-partner-admin <<PSC_Admin_of_destination_node>> --dest-domain-name <<destination_PSC_domain>>

Input parameters and arguments:

Parameter	Argument
--src-emb-admin	SSO Admin account for the source vCenter. Only the account name should be provided. Default is Administrator
--replication-partner-fqdn	FQDN of destination vCenter. My case FQDN of VCSA01
--replication-partner-admin	SSO admin account for the destination vCenter. Only the account name should be provided. Default is Administrator
--dest-domain-name	Vsphere SSO domain of the destination vCenter. In my case vsphere.local.

One you hit Enter, you can see the following output.

This will prompt you for the source and destination SSO passwords and prompt to confirm the action. Press Y to continue.

This pre-check will log the conflict data in '/storage/domain-data' directory. Navigate to this location to see the detected conflicts.

cd /storage/domain-data/

If you see any conflicts you have to resolve these conflicts. There are three resolutions available.

Copy: Create a duplicate copy of the data in the target domain.
Skip: Skips copying the data in the target domain.
Merge: Merges the conflict without creating duplicates.

Once, we resolve the conflicts in above .JSON file we can continue with the domain join process. This will be achieved by setting -m parameter to execute in the command syntax we used to do the pre-check.

cmsso-util domain-repoint -m execute --src-emb-admin Administrator --replication-partner-fqdn <<FQDN _of_destination_node>> --replication-partner-admin <<destination_node_PSC_Admin_user_name>> --dest-domain-name <<destination_PSC_domain>>

Same as the pre-check step it will ask for both administrator passwords for source and destination vCenters and then ask to confirm the action that you are about to execute.

This will take some time as it has lots of background processes to complete and this will uninstall PSC and reinstall it in Source vCenter as well. Also during this process source vCenter will be unavailable to end users.

Domain re point in action

Validate the Configurations

ELM configuration

Also you can check from the SSH console using following command.

Change the directory to /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin
Execute following command.

./vdcrepadmin -f showpartners -h VCSA_FQDN -u administrator -w Administrator_Password

vdcrepadmin status

You can use the above steps to re point a single vCenter server node from one domain to another existing domain as well.

How to Migrate Windows vCenter 6.7 to VCSA 7

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 18:31:00 +0000

As you all aware with the release of vSphere 7 VMware no longer supports for Windows based vCenter and now its only the vCenter Appliance. VMware VCSA or vCenter Server Appliance is a Photon OS based virtual appliance that was introduced with the vSphere 5 and over the past years this has improved in many ways.

So if you are running and Windows based vCenter Server and plan to migrate to vCenter Server appliance, here is the step by step guide for you. In this article I'm converting Windows vCenter 6.7 to VCSA 7. But same goes to other applicable upgrades too.

Few things to remember:

Converting Windows based vCenter to VCSA is not applicable to linear migrations. (within same vSphere version).
In order to convert your Windows based vCenter it must be at least running version 6.0. However it is strongly recommended to check the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices always to check the correct upgrade path.
Since with the vSphere 7 it's no longer support for external PSC it will be converge during the upgrade, However if you are planing to do this on different version than this article explained always check the related product documentation from VMware site.
During this migration process you need to have a temporary IP address which is fully reachable through the current VCS IP address. I strongly recommended same IP as the current VCS as most of the organizations doesn't have firewall rules within the same subnet. so less pain.

let's migrate the VCS 6.7 to VCSA 7.

Prepare the VCS 6.7:

Download the VCSA 7 ISO file from the official VMware site and mount it to the vCenter server. If you have external PSC you don't need to do this on the PSC itself but if you are doing this for older vSphere versions it might require to run the following tool in PSC as well.

Browse L:\migration-assistant (L is the drive letter for the DVD ROM). Locate the VMware-Migration-Assistant.exe and run as Administrator. Provide the SSO administrator password when prompted.

vCenter Migration Assistant initial prechecks.

Let the tool to run itself. Once it finished the prechecks it will display the message "waiting for migration to start...."

vCenter Migration Assistant waiting to start the migration.

Migrating from vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server is a two stage process. The first stage involves deploying a new vCenter Server to the target ESXi host or a compute resource in the target vCenter Server. The second stage completes the vCenter Server setup and copies data from the source vCenter Server for Windows to the deployed vCenter Server. Before starting with the migration process, make sure you have backed up all data.

Deploy the VCSA.

Again, Mount the VCSA 7 ISO file to a PC/Server, than your VCS which has fully access to VCS. Run the installer located at L:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32.

Select the migration option in the menu.

vCenter installer migration option.

The next screen will explain the process and notify you about external PSC being converge to embedded.

Click next to accept EULA and then it will ask the details about source vCenter.

Provide the source vCenter details and don't change the migration assistant port if you haven't change it in the tool. Provide SSO username and password. Then continue. It will prompt to verify the SSL thumbprint click YES to accept it. Since this Windows based vCenter uses external PSC it will also display a warning about the converge from external to embedded PSC.

Converge to an embedded Platform Services Controller.

Click YES to continue. It will ask for VCSA deployment target and if you have only one vCenter and you are about to migrate it then enter ESXi details.

vCenter Server deployment target

Again you will be prompted for certificate warning and then it will ask the VCSA VM details. provide the name for the VM and password for root account.

Set up target vCenter Server VM

Then select the deployment size. This screen will provide you the available deployment options, how much resources it needed and how many hosts and VMs it can support.

Select Deployment Size

Once you select the deployment size, continue to select the datastore. This will show you all the available Datastores available to deployment target VC or ESXi host which you select earlier. Once the Datastore selected the next screen will ask you the IP details.

Configure Network Settings

Remember that, these IP settings are temporary and once the migration completed it will use the same IP which the current VCS has. Once filled these data continue to the summary page.

Ready to complete stage 1.

All the information you have provided so far related to the new VCSA will be shown here as well as the notice about PSC as well. Continue to start the stage 1.

Stage 1: deploy vCenter Server.

Migrate the vCenter

Once the stage 1 completed it will display the success massage and will give you the option to continue to stage 2.

Stage1 completed.

Once you hit the continue button setup will continue to following screen.

Migrate - Stage 2.

This will give introduction about what you are about to do and click next to run the prechecks. Once prechecks completed it will show you the warnings and errors if there is any.

Pre-migration check result.

Click close to continue if you are OK with the given warnings and have fixed errors if there is any. Once the source vCenter details verified in the next scree it will ask the replication partner details. If this is the first or only VCS then select the default. If you already have a VCSA in same domain and wish to configure linked mode select the second radio button and provide the relevant details.

Configure replication.

In the next screen it will ask the AD details and provide a user account details which has permission to join a machine to your AD. Once those completed it will ask to select the migration data.

You have 3 options to select.

Configuration and inventory data - The minimum data require to transfer from source to target to have a functioning VCSA.
Configuration, Inventory, task and events - This has the task and event details along with the configuration and inventory data.
Configuration, inventory, task and events, and performance metrics - This is the largest amount of data you can copy from source to target.

Along with these option it will show the estimated downtime for each option.

select migration data

The next screen will ask your preference to join CEIP select the chek box if you wish to join with it. then continue to summary page.

Ready to complete.

Once you have verified all the details and have take a backup for your vCenter, Select the check box and click Finish to start the stage 2 - migration process.

If you return to your Windows VC you can see the migration assistant is doing the same process in the background as the UI.

Migration assistant background process

Data transfer and vCenter server setup in progress

Once the migration completed, this will automatically power off the source Windows based vCenter and power on the newly configured VCSA. Remember that, if you had external PSC, once you verified all the configurations in new VCSA you have to manually power off it.

System Configuration

This is my journey from VCS 6.7 to VCSA 7. If you have any question please feel free to ask and if you really like my post please share it.

Disk Space Usage for root on Controller VM has exceeded 80% after AOS upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 15:58:00 +0000

After the Nutanix AOS upgrade to version 5.11 or above you may receive “Disk space usage for root on Controller VM has exceeded 80%” warning in your cluster. This occurs because the journalctl log file size is increased with these newest AOS versions. To resolve this follow the below steps.

Step 1: Check the journalctl usage

nutanix@cvm$ allssh 'sudo journalctl --disk-usage’

Step 2 : Remove the excess usage than 512MB

nutanix@cvm$ allssh 'sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=512M'

Step 3: Make this change persistent

nutanix@cvm$ allssh 'sudo sed -i 's/1024M/512M/' /etc/systemd/journald.conf'

Then restart journal process.

nutanix@cvm$ allssh 'sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald'

Now your alert should be disappear and you can check the root usage with following command.

nutanix@cvm$ allssh df -h | grep /dev/md0

Note: if you are uncertain about the above steps and trying this on your own I strongly recommended to engage the Nutanix Support.

VCSA - Converge External PSC to Embedded PSC using Converge Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:07:00 +0000

As you may know. VMware is no longer support external platform services controller with vSphere version 7 and have announced it's decision to deprecating it with vSphere 6.7U2.

So today, I'll explain the process of converge two vCenters which linked together using one external PSC.

So, Login to your vCenter and select Administration under the top Menu.

Then select System Configuration under the Deployment selection.

In here you can see the current setup of your existing vCenter setup. And if you click the view as topology link in the top right you can see how each component connects to each other as a map view.

As you can see I have a one external PSC and two vCenters connect to it. If you have vCenters with each having it's own external PSC and in linked mode the process is same and you don't need to do any additional configurations in your setup.

So, First select the VCSA you want to converge and mount the VCSA installer disk to the appliance.

Please note that you need to mount the exact same version ISO file to the appliance otherwise your converge process will fail with the error saying "Failed to get RPMs".

Once your first VCSA selected, Click Converge to Embedded link in the top.

The it will give you a warning about the downtime and click Proceed to continue.

In the next screen, you have to provide the SSO password and if you have replication partners (This may apply if you have VCSA/s with embedded PSC/s in the same domain) you can point it here.

Once you start the Converge process, you can see the progress from the system configuration section.

Once the process completed, now you can see the vCenter type for converged VCSA type has changed to vCenter with embedded platform services controller.

Then repeat the steps above for all the VCs available in your setup.

Decommission External PSC.

Once, All vCenters converged to embedded it's time to decommission the external PSCs. Before doing that you have to make sure, if there is any other VMware solution that point to these external platform services controller/s you have to re-point them to a relevant embedded platform service controller.

Once everything confirmed select the external platform services controller and click the Decommission PSC link above.

Then agree with the warning and continue the decommission process. Then again you have to provide the SSO password.

Once these details provided continue with the decommission process and you can monitor the status from the system configuration section.

Now all our vCenters converged to embedded platform services controller and have decommissioned all the external platform services controller.

VCSA 6.7 External PSC Converge Process Failed with "Failed to Get RPMs"

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 06:36:00 +0000

As you aware from vSphere 7 VMware is no longer support for external PSC and they have announced it with the release of vSphere 6.7 U2.

VMware Deprecating External PSC

And they have provided the option to converge your existing Platform Services Controller to a embedded platform controller with the version 6.7 and during the vSphere 7 upgrade process your external platform services controller will be automatically converted into embedded platform services controller.

When I tried to converge my existing vCenter 6.7 U2 with external platform services controller to VCSA with embedded PSC I encountered following error.

"Failed to get RPMs"

Following are the troubleshooting steps I have taken to resolve the issue.

Then open the converge.log file to check the error in more details.

As you can see in the highlighted are the mounted ISO file to the VCSA is not the same version as the current VCSA version. SO I had two option.

1. Update the VCSA to matching version to attached ISO version.

2. Download and attach the same version ISO to VCSA.

Since the second option is much easier, I have downloaded the matching ISO version from official VMware site. Link

And the mounted the ISO using following command.

And then I have started the converge process and I was able to successfully converge my VCSA to embedded.

Setup a Home Lab Using Desktop PC

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 16:23:00 +0000

As couple of people ask me about home lab build, I decided to explain the my current setup. For running the VMs that I need, I decided to go with a powerful Desktop PC as running a server is a bit headache for me when considering noise, cooling, electricity etc. So Desktop is a ideal solution for me, of course it has some performance drawbacks but not in now a days as both Intel and AMD Chipsets now supports up to 128GB of RAM and have some advance features too. So following the current spec of my PC.

CPU : AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 core 16 threads)

Motherboard : ASUS TUF Gaming X570

RAM: 32GB DDR4 hopefully will upgrade to 64GB soon

Storage : few SSDs as required.

Note that CPU is most expensive unit in your PC, So upgrading/changing it might not be easy sometimes. If you are planning to buy a new PC for your home lab setup, note that currently Intel has discontinued Hyper Threading technology for core i3 and i5 from their 8^th generation onwards and for i7 9^th generation on wards. So if you think about core count which limit the CPU you can assign for a VM, carefully think about the CPU manufacture and product generation.

I’m running with Windows 10 and using VMware workstation Pro 15.5. I have seen there are some user complains about VMware workstation pro 15 compatibility issue with Windows 10 latest update. So be mindful about that as well. Also I have enabled virtualization capabilities in BIOS level so my 8 core processor will be seen as 16 core processor logically.

So, in a lab environment Microsoft Active Directory play a major role. As it will help you to resolve DNS locally, Manage DHCP, User accounts and so on.

Create a Virtual Machine in VMware Workstation Pro.

Under VMware Workstation File Menu select create new VM (CTRL + N) to begin the VM creation process.

new Virtual Machine Wizard

You have two options, I just go with Typical always as it has everything that I needed. Then it will prompt to select OS installation media and I always recommend select last option – I will install the operating system later.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Then it will ask you to select the guest OS you are trying to install. Always select the correct one or if it doesn’t show in the menu select the closet matching OS.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Name your VM and select you preferred location to save VM files always use a disk/s with high IOPS.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Select the disk size but remember this will be thin provision.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Finally you can review and finish creating the VM.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Then you can edit the VM and mount the OS disk also you can do other configurations if you wish to do.

New Virtual Machine Wizard

Virtual Network Editor

Since I don’t want to manage my VMs via VMware Workstation console, I decided to enable remote access either RDP, SSH, local OS browser to access VMware vCenter and ESXi, I have done some modifications to the Vmware etwork adapter which installed into my Desktop PC.

As I mentioned earlier my lab setup consist of a Windows AD server which has DNS and DHCP roles installed. The domain is test.local and I decided to use 192.168.100.0/24 network. You can use whatever the domin name and network, I will show you how my setup is configured.

Following are the network adapters in my Desktop PC.

Network Adapters

As you can see apart from my Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth adapter there is another two virtual adapters installed. These will be automatically added when you install VMware Workstation. VMnet1 is a Host only adapter and VMnet8 is a NAT adapter.

Since I want my access my VMs via desktop, I select properties of VMnet1 and select IPv4 properties.

Here, I’m using this adapter as a gateway for the 192.168.100.0/24 network and I use following settings and use my DC installed in Workstation as the DNS server.

VMnet IPv4 properties.

Since this adapter is use as a gateway the IP assigned to VMnet1 will be the default gateway for my all VMs. Then go to VMware workstation and select Virtual network Editor under Edit menu.

Virtual Network Editor

Click Change Settings button on right bottom to edit the adapter settings.

Virtual Network Editor

As you can see now there is there options for a virtual network adapter to configure.

Bridged – This will directly connect to the physical adapter in desktop PC and we can select the physical adapter manually or automatically.
NAT – This option will share the host IP with VMs
Host-Only – This will create a private network with the host .

As you can see, if you want to enable DHCP you can define the DHCP range here as well. Since my AD is configured for DHCP I have disabled that option. Then under the VM settings menu I have select the host-only adapter to allow communication between the VM and the host and this will enable the communication between VMs as well.

Anyway, If you don’t have ability to setup your own lab you can use VMware hands on labs from below link. It will allow you to explore the product via given guidelines or you can skip it and use it for whatever you decided to try on a lab. There is no limitation on VMware HOLs to use only the lab manual provided with each lab.

http://hol.vmware.com/

if you have any questions regarding setup your own lab feel free to ask me.

How to Update VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 with External PSC

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 09:26:00 +0000

If you are running vCenter Server Appliance 6.7x version and if you wish to update it to applicable/ newer 6.7x version, its and easy few click process within the appliance management interface. First you have to download the required FP .iso file from the VMware download portal if your platform services controller and or vCenter Server Appliance doesn’t have internet access.

Please note that, if you are running vCenter Server Appliance with External Platform Services Controller, you have to upgrade PSC first, Then VCSA, Then ESXi host and then other integrated plugins if required.

From VMware download portal first you have to select VC and version that you are looking the update patches for.

Please note that this .ISO file is not the VCSA installer ISO file which you can download from the product download page. (note the size difference here)

Then you have to login to your external platform service controller appliance management interface by navigating to “https://<<your PSC IP or FQDN>>:5480”. Then navigate to Update option under the left hand side menu.

If your PSC have internet access you can click the Check Updates button to automatically check the available updates through internet. If your PSC doesn’t have internet attach the downloaded ISO file to the PSC appliance and then select CD/DVD option under the dropdown menu of Check Updates button. Then it will show as follows.

Then you can click the RUN PRE-UPDATE CHECKS link to verify that the selected update is applicable to your PSC. Once it verified you have two options.

STAGE ONLY
STAGE AND INSTALL

STAGE ONLY: Copy the selected update file/s to the PSC appliance

STAGE AND INSTALL: Copy and then perform the installation.

It’s always better to stage and then perform the installation.

Once the Stage process completed you can click INSTALL to begin the installation process.

Then it will prompt for the EULA.

Once you read and accept the agreement click the Next.

You can participate CEIP if you wish to, then click Next.

In this screen, it will provide you an estimated downtime for the PSC and will ask you to take backup of you appliance and provide you the option to get a file based backup if you wish to do so. Once available backup verified you can select the confirmation check box and click Finish to start the installation process.

Then the progress will show and once it completed it will show as follows.

Once you reload the browser you can see that it has been upgraded to selected patch level. Once you update all your external platform services controllers you can start with your vCenter Server Appliance/s. And process is same as above. Noe that same update ISO file will be used for both PSC and VCSA update.

VMware Deprecating External PSC

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 02:30:00 +0000

With the release of vSphere 6.7 and vSphere 6.5 update 2 VMware has announced the Enhanced Linked Mode support for VCSA with embedded platform services controller and in future release (not update) they will no longer provide an option to deploy the external PSC. This allows less pain for VMware administrators as the deployments, upgrades are become much easier and less nodes in the environment as most of the vCenter components are now merged in to single appliance.

External Platform Services Controller, A Thing of the Past.

So, what are the options ?

VMware has introduced a convergence utility with vSphere 6.7 U1 which is command line utility and with the release of vSphere 6.7 U2 they have introduced the GUI utility as well. So if you are running VCSA with external platform services controller you have to upgrade the environment to at least 6.7U1 and the converge all your external PSCs to embedded PSCs.

Update vCenter 6.7.x

Upgrade LCM on Nutanix Cluster Without Internet Connectivity.

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 09:52:00 +0000

To upgrade the LCM in a Prism element which don’t have internet access we need to download the LCM dark site repository from Nutanix site. Log in to Nutanix portal using your account and navigate to Downloads section then Tools and Firmware tab. Then select the “LCM Dark Site Bundle <<version>>” which you need to update the LCM version. The available version when writing this article is 2.2 and required file is “lcm_dark_site_bundle_2.2.11203.tar.gz”

Once you download it, let’s move to IIS web server. On your IIS server open the IIS manager. Under the Default Web Site (or whatever your chosen web directory) right click and select Add virtual Directory option.

Set the Alias and Physical path as follows. And then press OK to set the virtual directory.

In IIS manager select newly created directory and double click on Directory Browsing.

Then click Enable on right hand side panel to enable directory browsing.

Add new MIME type as follows.

Se the permission in release folder to “Full Control” IIS users. Some permissions need to be set from physical folder level.

Copy the downloaded tar.gz file to release folder under “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\release” and extract it.

Login to Prism element. Go to LCM. Under Option go to advanced settings. In the following screen point LCM repository to your IIS server as follows.

Fetch update from URL to http://<<ip or FQDN of your IIS server>>/release/

Then you will be able to get the LCM upgraded to the desired version and perform upgrades as usual.

Nutanix - Foundation upgrade failed with services running on one of the node

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:00:00 +0000

Today I tried to upgrade the foundation on one of Nutanix cluster and it failed with the error saying “Foundation Service running on one of the nodes, Test Failed”. I was wondering why foundation service/s are running on CVMs and then I checked the recent tasks in Prism. Then noticed that there were too many LCM checks are failed recently and then that could be the issue as foundation service is not running under normal operations.

So, I SSH into one of the CVM, then ran the following command.

allssh ‘genesis status | grep foundation’

Then I noticed that, there were few CVMs which are currently running foundation service. If you see the highlighted output (sorry for the creepy image, I didn’t had the proper image editing tool at the time I’m writing this article) you can see the process ID inside the brackets for each service and for the CVMs that are not running foundation service process ID is null.

So, then I SSH to each CVM and then issues following command to kill the foundation service.

genesis stop foundation

Once you hit enter, it will kill the foundation service and shows the services are currently running on the CVM. If you closely look at the highlighted area no process ID shown for Foundation.

Once I kill foundation service on each CVM, I was able to continue the foundation upgrade as usual.

Please note that, If you destroy a cluster foundation service will started permanently until you create a new cluster or add the nodes to any existing cluster. In above scenario it’s a production cluster and so my guess was correct as LCM uses foundation service to run certain operations.

Deploy VCSA 6.7 Appliance with Embedded Platform Services Controller - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 16:15:00 +0000

In previous post we have discussed about first step of deploying a new VCSA 6.7 appliance with embedded platform services controller.

Once we completed the deploy VCSA wizard, and if you have correctly setup DNS for your new VCSA it will automatically continue to the second step, configure the newly deployed VCSA.

In the welcome screen press Next to continue to setup your new vCenter server appliance.

In this screen it will ask basic config about your appliance. Time synchronization settings and SSH access. Once you set the desired settings click Next.

Here you have to configure the SSO settings for your new vCenter, either create a new SSO domain or join an existing domain. Once you completed the SSO settings depend on you setup press next. In my lab environment, I'll create a new SSO domain.

If you wish to participate VMware CEIP the tick the check box, else lease blank.

In summary page you will see all the settings for your new vCenter and click Finish if all are correct and once you start the configure process there is no revert back option.

If everything goes smoothly, you will be prompted for the final wizard with instructions to connect to your newly created vCenter.

Deploy VCSA 6.7 Appliance with Embedded Platform Services Controller - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 16:10:00 +0000

In this post I'll show you how to install an vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 with embedded platform services controller. Deploying a VCSA is now very simple process. You have to have a existing vCenter server if you are planning to add a new vCenter appliance to existing environment or if you are deploying VCSA for the first time you need to have a physical server installed with ESXi hypervisor.

In following scenario I'll describe you to deploy a new VCSA for a new environment. In my lab environment I have a ESXi server installed with 6.7 version, Microsoft 2016 domain controller and jump box server which I have access to both DC and ESXi server.

The new VCSA installation process has 2 steps. the first one is deploy the appliance and the second is configure the appliance. To continue with the 2nd step automatically after completing step 1 make sure you have DNS forward and reversve lookup records for your vCenter server name in your domain.

Once you run the installer.exe located in M:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 (note the M drive is my DVD drive) you will get the following introduction screen.

Click on image to see enlargement.

Click Next and agree the EULA.

Click on image to see enlargment

In the Next screen you have to select the deployment type, either VCSA with embedded platform services controller or VCSA with external platform services controller. As topic says I'm using the first option.

Then installer will ask you few details about installer target either existing vCenter server or single ESXi server.

.
Once correct details are entered press next. Then it will show you certificate warning depending on your deploy target and press yes to accept it.

Then it's time to customize your new VCSA. You have to mention the VM name (which will shown in your vCenter object not the DNS name) and a root password for your VCSA. This is for administrating the VCSA appliance and not the SSO password.

Then select the deployment type depending on your environment size. all details are provided in the screen.

Then select the available datastore which has enough free space.

Configure network page in the next screen where you have to specify the IP address the virtual network that this VCSA connect FQDN and other network settings.

Once all details are filled correctly continue to the final step.

Once you review all the settings for your new appliance click Finish.

Then installer will start the deploying the VCSA and once it will finish it will prompt you to continue with the appliance or else you can close it and continue later. If you don't have DNS resolution for your vCenter server the Continue option will not work and you have to connect to VCSA managment interface manually and continue the second step.

Virtual Networking - Vsphere Standard Switch

noreply@blogger.com (Isuru Wijesinghe) — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 06:55:00 +0000

Virtual Networking enables the ability to virtual machines to communicate with other network devices on the network. If we think about physical network the physical computers needs a NIC card to enable communication with the network. Same as the virtual machine we use virtual NIC cards. same function as the physical NIC. Also physical network require physical switch to connect servers/devices together. In the virtual networking we are using virtual switch to do the same job.

Virtual machines uses Esxi hosts physical NIC card as a network uplink. The numbers of uplinks depends on your requirement or depend on your physical host capabilities. Then these uplink connect to the virtual switch and enable the communication between virtual machines and outside world. The following diagram illustrate this.

Virtual Networking

The Esxi detects all the available NICs on physical host. We can see all available NICs by navigating networking sub menu under the configuration tab.

Network configuration tab

In my case you will see I have two virtual switches and they are identified as a Vsphere Standard Switch. There are two virtual switch types.

Vsphere Standard Switch
Vsphere Distributed Switch

Vsphere standard switch defined in host level and Distributed switch defined in Vcenter level. It means that Standard switch needs to be created in each Esxi host and Distributed switch once created in Vcenter can be distributed across the Esxi hosts.

Create a Vsphere Standard Switch

When installing Esxi it will automatically create a Standard switch for you. You can use this existing switch and modify it as you wish or you can create a new one. Navigate to the networking under the configuration tab. then you will see the link called add networking.

Then it will ask you what connection type do you need.

Virtual machine
VMkernel

Virtual Machine ports uses for handling the virtual machine traffics. These ports support 802.1Q VLAN tagging. So you can create VLANs in your virtual switch and separate VLAN traffic as same as Physical switch. This is a great feature in virtual networking.

VMkernel ports used for management traffic such as vMotion, Host management etc. VMkernel ports must have a unique IP address. This is same as physical switch management port.

Add Network Wizard

In this case I'm continue with Virtual machine Port. Then it will ask whether you want to create a new virtual switch or use existing one.

If you choose to create a new virtual switch it will ask you to assign physical NICs that are available to assign. One physical NIC cannot bind to more than one virtual switch. In preview window in the bottom will display the diagram of your switch.

Create virtual switch

Click next to continue.

Add virtual switch

The network label property allows you to name your new virtual machine network. Remember that this is just for identification. This has nothing to do with VLAN tagging. VLAN ID is the place to add VLAN ID. Then the traffic passed through this port group has the VLAN tagging that you specified. After configuring click Next.

Then it will display the summary and click Finish if you are OK with your configuration.

Navigate to Configuration tab again and you will see your newly created virtual switch.

Virtual switch

This graphical representation is a great feature in the Vsphere networking. It will shows Physical ports in the right side and virtual ports in the left side. And display the status of your physical uplinks.