Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

Back to Basics: Deploying the vCenter Server appliance

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I am going to do a couple of blogposts with “basic” workflows using the Web Client. Let me know if you find this useful or not… I will start with deploying the vCenter Server appliance and will assume you all know how to install ESXi. I prefer using the vCenter Server appliance in my lab as I can deploy it in minutes without the need to pre-install an OS etc.

The following steps outline the import process of the vCenter Server appliance.

  • Open the vSphere Client
  • Click “File – Deploy OVF Template”
  • Browse for the OVA file
  • Provide a name for the to be imported virtual machine, in our case “vCenter-01”
  • Select a datastore where this virtual machine should be stored
  • Use the default Disk Format
  • Provide the networking details like IP address, DNS, netmask etc.
  • Finish the wizard

During the reinstallation of my lab environment I ran in to this issue a couple of times. In my environment when I deploy the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCVA) I always got the following error on the remote console:

No Networking Detected

This seems to happen when I point my vSphere Client directly to a host and import the OVA. When you point your vSphere Client directly at a host you do not have the option to fill out the networking details in the OVF wizard. (At least I don’t…) When I point my vSphere Client to a vCenter Server and import the OVA I get the option to fill out the networking details.

no networking detected vcenter server

You can configure networking fairly simple. Just login to the console and type the following:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

Make sure to fill out the following sections:

2) Default Gateway
3) Hostname
4) DNS
6) IP Address Allocation for eth0

After this has been done type 1 to exit the configuration tool. Now the VCVA should be configured. In some cases I noticed that the “default gateway” setting did not stick. I would suggest validating this on the network tab of your management console, which can be found here: https://<IP address or DNS name of your vCenter instance>:5480.

Now that you have successfully deployed the vCenter Server appliance you can start exploring the new vCenter Web Client: https://<IP address or DNS name of your vCenter instance>:9443/vsphere-client/

Performance of vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO) white paper

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I just finished reading the “Performance of VMware vCenter 5.0 in remote offices and branch offices (ROBO)” white paper. I thought it was an excellent read and recommend it to anyone who has a ROBO environment. Also it is interesting to know what kind of traffic hosts / VMs drive in general to vCenter. Especially the details around the statistics level are worth reading for those deploying larger environments as it also gives a sense of the amount of data that vCenter is processing.

Nice work Fei Chen! You can find the paper here:

Performance of VMware vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO)
This document details the performance of typical vCenter 5.0 operations in a use case where vCenter manages ESXi hosts over a network with limited bandwidth and high latency, which is also known as a remote office, branch office (ROBO) environment.

(Although the date stamp on this entry says 2010 it is a June / 2012 paper, I will try to get this fixed!)

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!

 

 

Problems using the vCenter Web Client

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I was doing some upgrades in my lab and ran in to an issue. Whenever I started the vCenter Web Client I got a message that the vCenter Inventory Service wasn’t running. I looked at my Services section in Windows 2008 and found that it wasn’t started. Starting it gave me a new error: 1067. This is very generic but I figured I would google it anyway. That actually brought me to our own documentation, yes I should check that first next time, and it mentioned I could reset the inventory service as follows:

  • Stop the service (was already stopped)
  • Delete the entire contents of the Inventory_Service_Directory/data directory
  • Change directory to Inventory_Service_directory/scripts
  • Run the createDB.bat command, with no arguments, to reset the vCenter Inventory Service database
  • Run the register.bat command to update the stored configuration information of the Inventory Service
    register.bat vcenter-tm01.testlab.local 443
  • Restart the vCenter Inventory Service

I also had to re-register the Web Client to vCenter Server. This is what I had to do:

  • admin-cmd.bat register https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local:9443/vsphere-client https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local administrator password
Hope it helps,

 

Clarifying the SvMotion / VDS problem

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<Update>I asked William Lam if he could write a script to detect this problem and possibly even mitigate it. William worked on it over the weekend and just posted the result! Head over to his blog for the script! Thanks William for cranking it out this quick! For those who prefer PowerCLI… Alan Renouf just posted his version of the script! Both scripts provide the same functionality though!</Update>

I think there is some confusion around the SvMotion / VDS problem I described a couple of days back. Let me try to clarify it in a couple of simple steps.

First of all, this only applies to virtual machines that have been Storage vMotioned by vCenter 5.0 and are connected to a Distributed vSwitch. This could be either manually or using Storage DRS. So what is the exact problem?

  • When a VM is attached to a dvPortgroup it is connected to a port. This information is stored locally on the host and on the VMFS volume this VM is stored on.
  • This volume will contain a file which is named equal to the port number of this VM.
  • When the VM is Storage vMotioned to a different datastore this file is not created on the destination datastore
  • When the host fails on which the Storage vMotioned VM resides HA will attempt to restart that VM.
  • In order for HA to restart it and connect it to the dvPortgroup this file is required.
  • As the file is not available the restart fails.

You can simply resolve this by connecting the impacted VMs to a different dvPortgroup temporarily and then reconnect them back to the original portgroup. As soon as you’ve done that the file will be created on the datastore. For now this is a manual task, but I am sure some of my teammembers are working on a scripted solution as we speak… right Alan / William? 🙂