Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter infrastructure navigator

vCenter Infrastructure Navigator throws the error: “an unknown discovery error has occurred”

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I was deploying vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) in my lab today and the following error came up after I wanted to check dependencies for a virtual machine:

Access failed, an unknown discovery error has occurred

I rebooted several services but nothing seemed to solve it. Internally I bumped on a thread which had the fix for this problem: DNS. Yes I know always DNS right. Anyway, I used “DHCP” for my VIN appliance and this DHCP server pointed to a DNS server which did not have the IP/name of my ESXi hosts listed. Because of this the discovery didn’t work as VIN tries to resolve the names of the hosts as they were added to vCenter Server. I configured VIN with a fixed IP and pointed the VIN appliance to the right DNS server. Problem solved.

Navigating your application landscape…

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I was on a holiday the last two weeks and slowly catching up on everything that happened. Some of you might think it wasn’t a lot, but in the world of cloud and virtualization it was. Not only was there a huge EUC launch event but also a new version of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator was released. Somehow it has been amazingly quiet around this product. Something I didn’t really understand, especially not after reading the release notes of version 1.1 of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator. Two things stood out:

  • vCloud Director support
  • Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.

For those who don’t know, Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plugin for vCenter Server. This enables you to  get a better understanding of what is running on top of your virtual infrastructure. A lot of you may say, well why would I care? Think about DR for a second. What is the most challenging part of creating a DR Plan? Indeed, figuring out all dependencies. That is exactly where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator comes in to play as shown in the screenshot below, which I stole from Ben Scheerer. Ben wrote an excellent blog about some of the cool new features in vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, I am not going to repeat those just read his. It is worth it if you are serious about providing the best service to your (internal) customers!