Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

Increasing the time-out within vCenter for remote ESX hosts

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One of my colleagues is deploying an enormous VI3 environment. The customer wanted to have 1 central management console for all ESX hosts of which most hosts are located in a satellite offices. (One central management system for more than 200 hosts remote) With a 1Gb or more link this shouldn’t be a problem, but this customer had 64Kb links between these satellite offices and head quarters. This means that most ESX hosts were displayed as “disconnected” most of the time. To avoid this a time-out value for vCenter was increased:

The ESX Host sends heartbeats every 10 seconds, VirtualCenter server has window of 20 seconds to receive it. If the UDP Heartbeat message is not received VirtualCenter server will treat ESX as not responding.

By increasing the timeout limit in VirtualCenter, it will show the ESX host as continuously “connected”.

  1. Edit C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/VMware/VMware VirtualCenter/vpxd.cfg
  2. Add the following in the <vpxd> tags.
    <heartbeat>
    <notRespondingTimeout>60</notRespondingTimeout>
    </heartbeat>
  3. Restart VirtualCenter server service

New vCenter add-on announced: vCenter Heartbeat

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VMware just announced a new add-on for vCenter:

Source
As customers expand their use of VMware, maintaining a highly available management infrastructure is quickly becoming a key requirement. Learn about VMware’s new availability solution for vCenter Server and how it expands infrastructure and services sales opportunities.

The title of the webex is “Introducing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat”

In other words, there’s an add on coming up that provides high availability for your vCenter Server. We will have to wait until tomorrow before more details are announced!

I just also noticed that there will be a session at VMworld Europe on vCenter Server Heartbeat:

DC10 – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability (by David Friedlander VMware Product Manager)

Blades and HA / Cluster design

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After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.

The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.

Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time.  [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design

vCenter tasks time-out or ESX disconnects?

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I just received an email from a fellow consultant about a customer which had vCenter tasks time-out every once in a while. At times also ESX hosts got disconnected for no apparent reason at all. He discovered the following article by Richard Blythe aka VMware Wolf: ESX disconnects randomly or when doing VI client tasks from VC, task randomly timeout after a long idle time. Richard created a list of issues/errors that might be related to this issue:

  • ESX disconnects randomly from VirtualCenter
  • ESX disconnects when performing VI Client tasks from VirtualCenter.
  • Tasks randomly timeout after a long idle time
  • “An error occurred communicating to the remote host” pops up.

The article refers to an issue with vCenter Update 3 in combination with firewalls using state-ful inspection. The problem occurs because of SOAP timeouts, and this behavior did not exist in VC 2.0.x or 2.5 GA, as they used a different mechanism to communicate with ESX. The official KB article hasn’t been released yet but a temporary workaround has been published by Richard. If you run into any of the before mentioned issues head over to Richard’s website and try out the workaround until the fix or official KB article is released.

VMware Update Manager and port changes

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Today I’ve been troubleshooting a weird problem with a VMware Update Manager installation. VMware Update Manager was installed with a different port than usual because IIS was already running on the server.

When trying to install the plugin the following error appeared:

Unable to connect to the remote server

I would have expected that in either extension.xml or vci-integrity.xml in the VUM installation directory I would find a misconfigured option but this clearly wasn’t the case. Next stop: the vCenter database.

After clicking around in the database I wanted to run a query, but I still needed to find out which table the rows belonged to. I didn’t wanted to click every single table and start querying so I gave SQL this procedure a chance. The procedure is pretty straight forward, it gives you the option to enter a search string and search the entire database instead of doing “select * from emp” everytime.

EXEC SearchAllTables ‘vum-servername’

After running this procedure I found two entries which still contained the old port values which I updated with the following query:

update VPX_EXT_CLIENT set URL = ‘http://vumserver.yellow-bricks.com:8081/vci/downloads/VMware-UMClient.exe’ where Ext_Client_ID = ‘3’

I did some Oracle SQL courses back in the day when I still worked for Oracle, this is probably the first time I ever used it in real life though. 🙂