Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

web client

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to add an NFS share to all hosts

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If you look at the following workflow you know why I am starting to love NFS more and more… Adding an NFS datastore was easy with 5.0 (and prior) but with 5.1 it is even easier. Just a couple of steps to add an NFS datastore to your cluster:

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to create a Cluster object

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We’ve shown you how to create a vSphere Datacenter object, next we are going to create a cluster object. Again, this is fairly straight forward:

  • Click on “Create a Cluster” in your “Getting Started” tab.
  • Provide a name for your cluster and tick “Turn On” for both “DRS” and “vSphere HA”.
  • Click “OK”.

We will not tweak any settings around HA and DRS, the defaults should work for most, although I would prefer to use the “Percentage Based” admission control policy. For more details I would like to recommend reading the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive. [Read more…] about Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to create a Cluster object

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to create a Datacenter object

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I am going to assume you already have vCenter 5.1 up and running, if you don’t read this article. Once again, this is a “Back to Basics” series, so don’t expect deepdive info here.

First point your browser to the vSphere Web Client. The vSphere Web Client can be found at: https://<IP address or DNS name of your vCenter instance>:9443/vsphere-client/. Now you will see is a question if it is okay to install the “VMware Remote Console Plugin” as shown in the following screenshot.

[Read more…] about Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to create a Datacenter object

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,