Yellow-Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Copyright © 2016

VSAN Health checks disabled after upgrade to vCenter 6.0 U2

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Yesterday at the Dutch VMUG I was talking to my friend @GabVirtualWorld. Gabe mentioned that he had just upgraded his vCenter Server to 6.0 U2 in his VSAN environment, but hadn’t upgraded the hosts yet. Funny enough later someone else mentioned the same scenario and both of them noticed that the VSAN Health Checks were disabled after upgrading vCenter Server. Below a screenshot of the issue Gabe saw in his environment. (Thanks Gabe)

vsan health checks disabled

So does that mean there is no backwards compatibility for the Healthcheck, well yes and no. In this release we made our APIs public, William Lam wrote a couple of great articles on this, and in order to deliver a high quality SDK backwards compatibility had to be broken with this release. So if you received the “health checks disabled” message after upgrading to vCenter Server 6.0 U2, you can simply solve this by also upgrading the hosts to ESXi 6.0 U2. I hope this helps.

** Update March 23rd **

Please note that ESXi 6.0 Update 2 is also a requirement in order to enable the “Performance Service” which was newly introduced in Virtual SAN 6.2. Although the Performance Service capability is exposed in vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2, without ESXi 6.0 U2 you will not be able to enable it. When trying to enable it on any version of ESXi lower than 6.0 U2 the following error will be thrown:

Task Details:

Status: General Virtual SAN error.
Start Time: Mar 23, 2016 10:55:35 AM
Completed Time: Mar 23, 2016 10:55:38 AM
State: Error

Error Stack: The performance service on host is not accessible. The host may be unreachable, or the host version may not be supported

This is what the error looks like in the UI:

Here you go, VSAN 6.2 GA!

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We’ve been talking about if for a while now, but last night the moment finally arrived… VSAN 6.2 aka vSphere 6.0 Update 2 was released. I am not going to go in to any level of depth here, as I have written many posts on the subject of VSAN 6.2 already, and so has my friend Cormac, the best start is probably this blog though. You can read those if you want to get the nitty gritty details, or nerd knobs as apparently some like to call it. (I prefer to call it a healthy level of curiosity, but that is a different discussion.) Here is what is in 6.2:

  • Deduplication and Compression
  • RAID-5/6 (Erasure Coding)
  • Sparse Swap Files
  • Checksum / disk scrubbing
  • Quality of Service / Limits
  • In mem read caching
  • Integrated Performance Metrics
  • Enhanced Health Service

Now that is not it, there is also some new stuff in vSphere 6.0 Update 2, one which I feel is very welcome and that is the Host Client! A full HTML5 based client which comes as part of your ESXi host, very useful if you ask me! Also two-factor authentication was added for the Web Client, several enhancements to the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering and support for different databases for vCenter etc.

Okay, lets stop blabbing, start your download engines, find your bits here:

Awesome fling: ESXi Embedded Host Client

A long long time ago I stumbled across a project within VMware which allowed you to manage ESXi through a client which was running on ESXi itself. Basically it presented an html interface for ESXi not unlike the MUI we had in the old days. It was one of those pet-projects being done in spare time by a couple of engineers which for various reasons at the time was never completed. The concept/idea however did not die fortunately. Some very clever engineers felt it was time to have that “embedded host client” for ESXi and started developing something in their spare time and this is the result.

I am not going to describe it in detail as William Lam has an excellent post on this great fling already. The installation is fairly straight forward, basically a vib you need to install. No rocket science. When installed you can manage various aspects of your hosts and VMs including:

  • VM operations (Power on, off, reset, suspend, etc).
  • Creating a new VM, from scratch or from OVF/OVA (limited OVA support)
  • Configuring NTP on a host
  • Displaying summaries, events, tasks and notifications/alerts
  • Providing a console to VMs
  • Configuring host networking
  • Configuring host advanced settings
  • Configuring host services

Is that cool or what? Head over to the Fling website and test it. Make sure to provide feedback when you have it as the engineers are very receptive and always looking to improve their fling. Personally I hope that this fling will graduate and will be added to ESXi by default, or at a minimum be fully supported! Excellent work Etienne Le Sueur and George Estebe!

Deploy VCSA 6.0 firstboot error

I was doing some tests in my lab and while deploying a new VCSA 6.0 I received an error that firstboot was unsuccessful. Not really a great error message if you ask me but okay. I had already validated DNS twice before I got started, but I checked it again just in case… DNS was all good, what else could it be? Figured NTP could be another problem and my friend William Lam confirmed that. I checked the host if NTP was configured and it was not for some reason. So I configured NTP on my ESXi hosts which was straight forward, but what about the VCSA I had deployed? Also not too complicated, I logged in via SSH and did the following:

  • ntp.get
    Will show “Status: Down”
  • ntp.server.add –servers 10.17.0.1
    This configures VCSA to fetch the time from ntp server to 10.17.0.1
  • timesync.set –mode NTP
    Make sure that the time sync is set to ntp
  • ntp.get
    Should show “Status: Up”

That should do it… By the way, you can simply check “resolv.conf” for DNS to see how it is configured today, also look at “hosts” for the host name etc.

Migrate from Windows vCenter to the vCenter Appliance

I thought that most people would have seen this awesome fling by now, but I received a couple of questions if it was already possible to migrate from the Windows vCenter Server to the vCenter Server Appliance. Surprisingly enough as William Lam wrote an excellent blog post on this subject. Anyway, this blog is just a simple short pointer to the Windows vCenter to vCenter Appliance migration tool and to William blog post. Read it, and go for it!