Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter server

Why is vCenter Server trying to access assets.contentstack.io or send DNS requests for it?

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On VMTN I noticed somehow asking why vCenter Server was trying to access  assets.contentstack.io, and why there were so many DNS requests for  assets.contentstack.io. It took me a while to figure it out, but I noticed that there’s a plugin for the VMware Cloud Provider Services, this plugin is hosted on contentstack.io, and that is the reason you see vCenter Server trying to connect with that URL and why you are seeing DNS requests for assets.contentstack.io. You can prevent this from happening by simply selecting the plugin, and then removing it. That is, of course, if you are not planning on using these services.

Command-line upgrade of vCenter fails with Test transaction failed to update packages error

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I have various test environments, and one of my environments I was testing the command-line upgrade of vCenter Server. Now, most of my environments we tend to use for destructive testing and strange update/upgrade scenarios, so we hit some strange issues every now and then. While I was doing the command-line based upgrade of vCenter Server (see this post for how to do that), I hit an error. The error was the following:

Test transaction failed to update packages

I looked at the log called “/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/software-packages.log”, and I noticed the following entry:

eventlog is obsoleted by (installed) syslog-ng-3.17.2-1.ph3.x86_64

I removed the package manually as follows:

rpm -e syslog-ng-3.17.2-1.ph3.x86_64

I then retried the update and it worked, as shown in the screenshot below!

Very large sps-runtime.log.stderr log file

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On VMTN someone hit a situation where the sps-runtime.log.stderr log file grew extremely large on their vCenter Server Appliance (7.0 in this case). I have seen this before, and sizes over 10GB are not uncommon. The sps-runtime.log.stderr file belongs to the service that provides the Policy-Based Storage capabilities. You can of course stop the service and then delete the files, and restart the service again. However, you could also empty the file by simply doing the following on the command-line:

cat /dev/null > /storage/log/vmware/vmware-sps/sps-runtime.log.stderr

 

This results in a 0kb file immediately.

Running vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 in Fusion

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I am doing some simple tests at home and I am running the vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 in Fusion. In order to get it working there are a couple of tricks I have to perform, I find myself resorting to the same blogs over and over again so I figured I would just put it all on my own blog in a single location so I can simply copy/past where needed and don’t need to hit multiple sources.

First, deployment of vCenter Server in Fusion:

  • Download the vCenter Server Appliance ISO
  • Mount the appliance in OSX
  • Copy the file “vmware-vcsa” from the folder “vcsa”
  • Add “.ova” to the file by renaming it
  • Open fusion go to “File” and “Import” the OVA but don’t start it
  • Edit the “vmx” file of the VM you just created
    • Typically stored under Documents –> Virtual Machines
    • I edit them using vi through the terminal as that is what I’ve used for the last decade or so. The path for me looks something like this:
    • /Users/depping/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/vmware-vcsa-2800571.vmwarevm
  • You will need to add a bunch of entries, I lifted these from William’s site of course… Thanks William
    guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = “embedded”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = “vsphere.local”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = “vsphere”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = “VMware1!”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = “ipv4”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = “192.168.1.5”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = “192.168.1.5”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = “24”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = “static”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = “192.168.1.1”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = “192.168.1.1”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = “VMware1!”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = “true”

Now I want to update vCenter Server, 6.0 in this instance, was described by Ryan Johnson recently, I tweaked it to meet my own needs

  • Download the patch: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search
    • Note that this isn’t the regular ISO file, the filename should look something like this: VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.0.0.10000-3018521-patch-FP.iso (6.0U1)
  • Mount the ISO through Fusion
  • SSH in to the vCenter Server:
    • ssh root@192.168.1.5
  • Now from the command run the “software-packages” command and let it use the ISO you just mounted
    • software-packages install –iso  –acceptEulas
  • This upgrade  will take a couple of minutes usually, in my case it took about 7 minutes to complete, next you will need to reboot the vCenter Server:
    • shutdown reboot -r updates

That’s it… easy right.

Migrate from Windows vCenter to the vCenter Appliance

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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!