Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

License server VM down, now what?

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On twitter John Troyer retweeted a question a couple of days ago which basically came down to the following: When your VM which contains the license server goes down and has been down for longer then 14 days you will not be able to actually boot it up. This is because the grace period has expired.

As a VMware PSO Consultant my recommendation is to make sure you always have a “host based” license file laying around. In a normal situation you don’t need to use it. But in a situation like this it will be very useful because you can just change the license to a host based license instead of a “license server”. This would enable you to actually boot up the License VM. When booted up you could easily revert the changes again and point to your license server again.

Export and import DRS affinity rules

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I just noticed this awesome work by LucD. He developed two scripts which can import and export DRS affinity rules. Especially in large environments or environments that have multiple affinity rules this is an excellent solution. Take a look at the link above for more details. Luc posted the script half way down the topic in text but also added a modified version at the bottom. The VI Toolkit at it’s best… or should we call it PowerCLI these days?

Bluebear Kodiak, what’s up?

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I still receive a lot of beta invitation requests while it has been really quiet around Bluebear Kodiak over the last couple of months. (I did a (p)review a while back) I just received an email that a brand new version of the Kodiak beta is about to be released. I already received the Air file but haven’t been able to test it yet. But Matt Miller of Bluebear uploaded a demo video just which shows some of the new features and I must say it really looks slick.

If you are still looking for an invite, I received another 50 and it’s on a first come first serves base. Just click here for an invitation.

(update: the invites don’t seem to be working, I will ask Bluebear to fix it asap.)

Virtual Machines appear to be running or registered on multiple ESX Servers

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I was doing my daily round on the VMTN Forums and noticed this topic on VMs flickering between ESX hosts. I’ve personally never witnessed this and didn’t even knew it was a known issue. Luckily Troy Clavell pointed the topic starter out to a KB article related to this exact issue. Apparently it’s being caused by the fact that the VM is registered on two hosts at the same time.

Symptoms:

  • After one of the following, a Virtual Machine appears as being registered on two ESX Servers:
    • A VMotion fails to complete correctly or times out in VirtualCenter
    • A DRS issue where virtual machines are VMotioned automatically in quick succession
    • When a machine is powered on during VMware HA failover.
    • The Service Console on an ESX host is low on memory starving the vpxa process
  • In VirtualCenter, you see the virtual machine as appearing on one ESX Server for a few seconds, then it seems to be on the other.
  • The virtual machine may appear to jump back and forth among different ESX hosts.

I’m not going to copy/paste the solution cause the KB article will probably change over time, but it’s most definitely worth looking into… it does sound like something that can happen to all of us.

The Basics: Moving hosts from one vCenter server to the other

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It seems to be a question that often pops up on the VMTN forum, how can I move my ESX hosts to my freshly installed vCenter server? The answer is actually pretty simple:

  1. Just to be on the save side, set DRS to manual and disable HA on the “old” vCenter server / cluster
  2. Right click the ESX host and select “Disconnect”
  3. Go to the new vCenter server and add the host

It’s as simple as that. You don’t even need to shutdown your VMs.
Keep in mind though that you will lose your folder structure as well. (Thanks Joop)